Featuring Our Faculty

Climate and Tourism

Community Outreach Interests

I am interested in the interrelationship between climate variability and tourism. As assistant director of the Center for Natural Hazards Research, I promote and participate in research and outreach with the goal of reducing the harm caused by natural and human forces to life, business and the environment.

Research Interests

Overall my research interests are in tropical meteorology and global precipitation variability, using remotely sensed satellite data. I have written extensively on predicting and describing the El Niño/Southern Oscillation and its global impacts. I am also investigating the summertime climatology of precipitation over Central America and the Caribbean Sea. Current and future work includes connecting climate variability and change to extreme precipitation and applying that to hydrologic responses and flooding. In that vein, I wrote a paper reassessing the hurricane Floyd flood with satellite, radar, and gauge data.

Notable Publications

Curtis, Scott. In press. "El Niño/Southern Oscillation and observed global precipitation patterns." Geography Compass.

Curtis, Scott. 2008. "The Atlantic multidecadal oscillation and extreme daily precipitation over the US and Mexico during the hurricane season." Climate Dynamics. 30(4): 343-351.

Curtis, Scott, Thomas W. Crawford, and Scott A. Lecce. 2007. "A comparison of TRMM to other basin-scale estimates of rainfall during the 1999 Hurricane Floyd flood." Natural Hazards. 43(2): 187-198.

Curtis, Scott. 2006. "Developing a Climatology of the South's 'Other' Storm Season: ENSO Impacts on Winter Extratropical Cyclogenesis." Southeastern Geographer. 46(2): 231-244.

Wuensch, S., J. Ast, and Scott Curtis. 2004. "The 2004 hurricane season: Impacts in North Carolina." North Carolina Geographer. 12: 34-40.

Courses

GEOG 6540: Advanced Coastal Storms (section on local perceptions of storms and forecasts).