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Mostly Cloudy Museum of Natural History honors Kennedy researcher
Kennedy High School senior Beatrice Brown was recently named a 12th-grade winner in the American Museum of Natural History’s annual Young Naturalist Awards, a national contest.
Brown won an all-expenses-paid overnight trip to New York City, where she will attend an awards ceremony at the museum and be given a special tour of its collections. Brown said she is excited to attend the ceremony because she has not been to the museum before.
Entrants to the YNA contest must submit 1,500- to 4,000-word essays on research projects of their choice. Brown’s paper was titled, “Forecasting Hurricane Hazards for the Long Island Area.” Papers were judged on the quality of their theses, data, presentation, and even grammar and spelling.
Brown, who is Kennedy’s valedictorian and will attend Yale University in the fall, looked at hurricane data that she obtained from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration dating back to 1870.
From there, she examined air circulation and water temperature at the surface of the Atlantic Ocean surrounding Long Island during six intense storms –– the unnamed hurricanes of 1936 and 1938, Hurricane Gloria in 1985, Hurricane Bob in 1991, Tropical Storm Irene in 2011 and Superstorm Sandy in 2012.
Brown set out to develop a hyper-local probability model that would predict, with a high degree of certainty, whether and when a hurricane would strike Long Island. Brown found that lower sea surface pressure and higher atmospheric circulation and water temperature correlated with major hurricanes that turned from their paths up the Eastern Seaboard into the Island and the Northeast, causing widespread destruction.
Brown’s model predicted that the Atlantic hurricane cycle peaked off Long Island’s coast around the time of Superstorm Sandy and is now “declining,” if only “a little bit.”
Brown’s home was devastated during Sandy. “After we were hit by Sandy, that’s really what motivated me to conduct this research and follow this path through the ASR program,” Brown said.
