Abstract

High-wind thunderstorm is a severe mesoscale weather phenomenon. Sea surface temperature (SST) is a synoptic-scale weather feature. In this article, the occurrences of seasonal thunderstorms associated with high wind in Florida, United States, over a period of 38 years (1969 to 2006) are correlated with the sea surface temperatures of the month of July in the Niño 1+2 region of the eastern Pacific Ocean over the same time period. It is found by statistical correlation and the random re-sampling technique that high-wind thunderstorms in most of the counties of Florida show negative correlation with the July SST in the Niño 1+2 region. Moreover, regression analysis and cross validation show that 95.92% of severe storms in Florida and 99.99% of SSTs of the Niño 1+2 region lie within 95% predicted confidence interval.