The social and economic impacts of hurricanes in the U.S. in the last few years stressed the necessity to better understand the variability, predictability and risk of tropical cyclones. In this talk, I will discuss the current understanding of various aspects of tropical cyclones, from the ability of the current generation of models to make forecasts on sub-seasonal time-scales, to the estimates of hurricane risk in locations with very few occurrences in the historical record, as well as future projections of tropical cyclone activity. While there has been significant progress in the last decades, many challenges remain. For instance, sub-seasonal hurricane forecasts are still on their infancy, and the predictability limits at these time-scales are still not well known. For hurricane risk assessments, besides the strong winds at landfall better estimates are needed, taking into account flooding due to storm surge and extreme precipitation. I will conclude with a discussion on the challenges and ideas for future research on extreme events with emphasis on hurricanes.
