Project Grant 2243407

This $225,566 Project Grant from the National Science Foundation's Geosciences program (CFDA 47.050) will fund research to characterize oceanic storm systems using microseism data. The awardee, President and Fellows of Harvard College doing business as Harvard University, will establish relationships between ground motion signals recorded by seismic stations and buoys and tropical cyclone parameters like wind speed and location. This work is the first step toward developing a seismic-based catalog of historical storms to complement existing records and provide a more comprehensive view of hurricane changes. The researchers will analyze wave and seismic observations from Atlantic storms over the last 20 years compared to NOAA's storm track dataset. Once relationships determine how responses vary with storm characteristics, the models will invert seismic data to constrain storm features. This project will also consider site effects and filtering small weather to strengthen constraints on microseism excitation mechanisms and locations. The end product will be an ability to extract storm data from seismics alone, improving understanding of energy transfer from fluids to solids and enabling historical storm analyses.