ONE TO WATCH

A Step Ahead of the Storm:

Antonia Comaniciu ’25

 Antonia was first author on a paper titled “Early Prediction of Seasonal Atlantic Hurricanes Using Sea Surface Temperature Maps and Neural Networks,” presented at the Oceans 2022 Conference last October.

 Working with co-author and adviser Hiroyuki Murakami of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), she proposed an original method to predict an upcoming hurricane season’s intensity.

 Antonia used convolutional neural networks to develop a model with results 20 percent more accurate than the seasonal predictions issued in May 2022 by NOAA, which uses geophysical models.

 “Neural networks are able to analyze hidden patterns in data and, specifically, by treating the maps as images, it can exploit their spatial information,” Antonia explains.

 Visit hurricaneprediction.net, where Antonia annually publishes her results.