  We are building a hurricane number prediction scheme based on first
predicting main development region sea surface temperature (SST), then
predicting the number of hurricanes in the Atlantic basin given the SST
prediction, and finally predicting the number of US landfalling hurricanes
based on the prediction of the number of basin hurricanes. We have described a
number of SST prediction methods in previous work. We now investigate the
empirical relationship between SST and basin hurricane numbers, and put this
together with the SST predictions to make predictions of both basin and
landfalling hurricane numbers.
