Recent increases in tropical cyclone intensification rates

Abstract

Tropical cyclones that rapidly intensify are typically associated with the highest forecast errors and cause a disproportionate amount of human and financial losses. Therefore, it is crucial to understand if, and why, there are observed upward trends in tropical cyclone intensification rates. Here, we utilize two observational datasets to calculate 24-hour wind speed changes over the period 1982–2009. We compare the observed trends to natural variability in bias-corrected, high-resolution, global coupled model experiments that accurately simulate the climatological distribution of tropical cyclone intensification. Both observed datasets show significant increases in tropical cyclone intensification rates in the Atlantic basin that are highly unusual compared to model-based estimates of internal climate variations. Our results suggest a detectable increase of Atlantic intensification rates with a positive contribution from anthropogenic forcing and reveal a need for more reliable data before detecting a robust trend at the global scale.

Tropical cyclone sensitivities to CO2 doubling: roles of atmospheric resolution, synoptic variability and background climate changes

“…FLOR has a compressed range to its intensity distribution, with storms being more similar to each other and weaker than observed storms. Meanwhile, HiFLOR has a broader intensity range in its TCs, and recovers the observed range more realistically including the existence of "Major" (Saffir-Simpson Category 3-4-5) TCs (Murakami et al 2015(Murakami et al , 2016aBhatia et al 2018Bhatia et al , 2019.…”

“…The availability of high-resolution GCMs has enabled the explicit exploration of regional climatic sensitivity, the response of extreme events to climate forcings, and the assessment of the time-evolving probability of extreme events (e.g. Zhao et al 2009;Walsh et al 2015;Wehner et al 2015;Delworth et al 2015;Haarsma et al 2016;Jia et al 2016, Murakami et al 2017a, b, 2018Van der Wiel et al 2016avan Oldenborgh et al 2017;Krishnamurthy et al 2018;Patricola and Wehner 2018;Zhang et al 2018;Bhatia et al 2019). Tropical cyclones (TCs) can have catastrophic impacts, particularly due to their extremely strong winds and precipitation (Pielke et al2008;Hsiang 2010;Mendelsohn et al 2012;Villarini et al 2014a).…”

The Köppen‐Trewartha Climate‐Type Changes Over the CORDEX‐East Asia Phase 2 Domain Under 2 and 3 °C Global Warming

“…Quantile mapping is a powerful bias correction method for adjusting not only mean but also variance and extreme distributions (Chen et al, 2013;Eum & Cannon, 2017;Teutschbein & Seibert, 2012). To overcome this defect, QDM has been developed to conserve projected relative changes in quantiles (Bhatia et al, 2019;Cannon et al, 2015;Eum & Cannon, 2017). To overcome this defect, QDM has been developed to conserve projected relative changes in quantiles (Bhatia et al, 2019;Cannon et al, 2015;Eum & Cannon, 2017).…”

“…However, it has disadvantages when applied to the future climate change data because of the stationary assumption that artificially offsets the model-projected trends (Hagemann et al, 2011;Maraun et al, 2017;Maurer & Pierce, 2014). To overcome this defect, QDM has been developed to conserve projected relative changes in quantiles (Bhatia et al, 2019;Cannon et al, 2015;Eum & Cannon, 2017). A detailed description of QDM is available in Appendix A of Cannon et al (2015).…”

Hurricanes Enhance Labile Carbon Export to the Deep Ocean

“…The global impact of hurricane activity on the ocean carbon cycle remains to be evaluated. Although there are uncertainties in historical trends of hurricane intensity (Klotzbach et al, 2015;Sobel et al, 2016;Walsh et al, 2016;Yan et al, 2017), recent modeling studies suggest that hurricane intensity will increase as climate warms (Bhatia et al, 2019;Bianucci et al, 2018;Kossin, 2017). Further studies, in particular at long time series sites, are needed to elucidate the various effects of hurricanes on the oligotrophic ocean's biological pump.…”