Annual arrival cycle of Atlantic tropical cyclones

Tropical cyclones occur in the North Atlantic Ocean and the Gulf of Mexico throughout the year. This paper statistically quantifies their annual arrival cycle. A Poisson process with a periodic time-varying intensity function is used to model the annual cycle of storm arrivals. The kernel method is used to estimate the time-varying intensity function. A data set that contains storm occurrence dates for the 120-year period 1871-1990 inclusive is analyzed. The estimated intensity function indicates that the peak of the hurricane season is around 12 September and that the true intensity function may be multi-modal. Adjustments are made in the analysis to account for storms that occurred but went unrecorded over the earlier years of the data record.