Mediterranean Tropical-Like Cyclones in Present and Future Climate

Cavicchia, Leone; Storch, Hans von; Gualdi, Silvio

doi:10.1175/jcli-d-14-00339.1

Cited by 98 publications

(110 citation statements)

References 28 publications

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“…The largest reductions occur in Autumn (September-November) and Spring (March-May), while small changes are found in Winter (December-February). Although the significance of the changes in individual seasons is low (the p values are 0.12 in Autumn and 0.18 in Spring), it suggests that the active medicane season will tend to be become more limited in winter, which is consistent with findings of Cavicchia et al (2014b). Chang (2014) suggests that MSLP might be a very poor way of looking at the changes in cyclone intensity as mean changes in MSLP project onto changes in the extremes, so the wind speed changes are the most important variable to analyse in the vicinity of the track.…”

Section: Future Climatesupporting

confidence: 79%

“…This reduction in the total number of medicanes (−30 %) is consistent with previous studies. For example, Cavicchia et al (2014b) found a reduction of about 20-60 % depending on the emission scenario, by applying dynamical downscaling to a global climate model while Romero and Emanuel (2013) estimated a reduction of 10-40% depending on the GCM used. Projected changes in medicane frequency for individual seasons are presented in Fig.…”

Section: Future Climatementioning

confidence: 99%

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Projected changes in medicanes in the HadGEM3 N512 high-resolution global climate model

et al. 2015

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Section: Future Climatesupporting

confidence: 79%

Section: Future Climatementioning

confidence: 99%

Projected changes in medicanes in the HadGEM3 N512 high-resolution global climate model

et al. 2015

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“…In this context, the future variations of medicane characteristics due to climate change are a matter of concern. RCMs have been used to downscale global climate model (GCM) scenarios (Gaertner et al 2007;Cavicchia et al 2014;Walsh et al 2014). Romero and Emanuel (2013) applied a statistical-deterministic method for increasing the medicane sample size.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Simulation of medicanes over the Mediterranean Sea in a regional climate model ensemble: impact of ocean–atmosphere coupling and increased resolution

et al. 2016

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International audienceMedicanes are cyclones over the Mediterranean Sea having a tropical-like structure but a rather small size, that can produce significant damage due to the combination of intense winds and heavy precipitation. Future climate projections, performed generally with individual atmospheric climate models, indicate that the intensity of the medicanes could increase under climate change conditions. The availability of large ensembles of high resolution and ocean–atmosphere coupled regional climate model (RCM) simulations, performed in MedCORDEX and EURO-CORDEX projects, represents an opportunity to improve the assessment of the impact of climate change on medicanes. As a first step towards such an improved assessment, we analyze the ability of the RCMs used in these projects to reproduce the observed characteristics of medicanes, and the impact of increased resolution and air-sea coupling on their simulation. In these storms, air-sea interaction plays a fundamental role in their formation and intensification, a different mechanism from that of extra-tropical cyclones, where the baroclinic instability mechanism prevails. An observational database, based on satellite images combined with high resolution simulations (Miglietta et al. in Geophys Res Lett 40:2400–2405, 2013), is used as a reference for evaluating the simulations. In general, the simulated medicanes do not coincide on a case-by-case basis with the observed medicanes. However, observed medicanes with a high intensity and relatively long duration of tropical characteristics are better replicated in simulations. The observed spatial distribution of medicanes is generally well simulated, while the monthly distribution reveals the difficulty of simulating the medicanes that first appear in September after the summer minimum in occurrence. Increasing the horizontal resolution has a systematic and generally positive impact on the frequency of simulated medicanes, while the general underestimation of their intensity is not corrected in most cases. The capacity of a few models to better simulate the medicane intensity suggests that the model formulation is more important than reducing the grid spacing alone. A negative intensity feedback is frequently the result of air-sea interaction for tropical cyclones in other basins. The introduction of air-sea coupling in the present simulations has an overall limited impact on medicane frequency and intensity, but it produces an interesting seasonal shift of the simulated medicanes from autumn to winter. This fact, together with the analysis of two contrasting particular cases, indicates that the negative feedback could be limited or even absent in certain situations. We suggest that the effects of air-sea interaction on medicanes may depend on the oceanic mixed layer depth, thus increasing the applicability of ocean–atmosphere coupled RCMs for climate change analysis of this kind of cyclones

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“…For future climate scenarios, a decrease in storm occurrence was found, due to increased atmospheric stability in analogy to the Polar Lows case. On the other hand a slight intensification of the occurring future storms was found (Cavicchia et al 2014b). As an example, Figure 4 shows the spatial densities of medicanes (given as number of tracks passing through a grid box) and the interannual variability.…”

Section: Simulating Small Synoptic Features Conditioned By the Large-mentioning

confidence: 99%

State and Perspectives of the Concept of Large‐Scale Conditioning of Regional Climate Modelling

Storch¹,

Cavicchia²,

Feser³

et al. 2018

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We review the state of dynamical downscaling with scale-constrained regional and global models. The methodology, in particular spectral nudging, has become a routine and well-researched tool for hindcasting climatologies of sub-synoptic atmospheric disturbances in coastal regions. At present, the spectrum of applications is expanding to other phenomena, but also to ocean dynamics and to extended forecasting. Also new diagnostic challenges are appearing such as spatial characteristics of small-scale phenomena such as Low Level Jets.

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Mediterranean Tropical-Like Cyclones in Present and Future Climate

Cited by 98 publications

References 28 publications

Projected changes in medicanes in the HadGEM3 N512 high-resolution global climate model

Projected changes in medicanes in the HadGEM3 N512 high-resolution global climate model

Simulation of medicanes over the Mediterranean Sea in a regional climate model ensemble: impact of ocean–atmosphere coupling and increased resolution

State and Perspectives of the Concept of Large‐Scale Conditioning of Regional Climate Modelling

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