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Title: Cluster Analysis of Downscaled and Explicitly Simulated North Atlantic Tropical Cyclone Tracks

Journal Article · · Journal of Climate
 [1];  [2];  [3];  [4];  [5];  [6];  [2];  [7];  [8];  [9];  [10];  [11];  [12];  [13];  [14];  [15];  [16]
  1. Univ. of Wisconsin, Madison, WI (United States). Space Science and Engineering Center
  2. Columbia Univ., Palisades, NY (United States). Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory
  3. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), Asheville, NC (United States). National Climatic Data Center (NCDC)
  4. Massachusetts Inst. of Technology (MIT), Cambridge, MA (United States)
  5. Univ. of Melbourne (Australia). School of Earth
  6. Columbia Univ., New York, NY (United States). Center for Climate Systems; NASA Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC), Greenbelt, MD (United States). Global Modeling and Assimilation Office, and Goddard Earth Sciences Technology and Research/I.M. Systems Group
  7. Florida State Univ., Tallahassee, FL (United States)
  8. NASA Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC), Greenbelt, MD (United States). Global Modeling and Assimilation Office, and Goddard Earth Sciences Technology and Research/I.M. Systems Group
  9. Texas A & M Univ., College Station, TX (United States)
  10. Met Office Hadley Centre, Devon (United Kingdom)
  11. Istituto Nazionale di Geofisica e Vulcanologia, Bologna (Italy); Centro Euro-Mediterraneo sui Cambiamenti Climatici, Lecce (Italy)
  12. Columbia Univ., New York, NY (United States). Dept. of Applied Physics and Applied Mathematics
  13. Univ. of Reading, Reading (United Kingdom). National Centre for Atmospheric Science, Dept. of Meteorology
  14. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), College Park, MD (United States). National Weather Service (NWS), National Centers for Environmental Prediction (NCEP), Climate Prediction Center
  15. Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. (LBNL), Berkeley, CA (United States); Univ. of California, Berkeley, CA (United States)
  16. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), Princeton, NJ (United States). Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Lab. (GFDL)
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A realistic representation of the North Atlantic tropical cyclone tracks is crucial as it allows, for example, explaining potential changes in U.S. landfalling systems. Here, the authors present a tentative study that examines the ability of recent climate models to represent North Atlantic tropical cyclone tracks. Tracks from two types of climate models are evaluated: explicit tracks are obtained from tropical cyclones simulated in regional or global climate models with moderate to high horizontal resolution (1°–0.25°), and downscaled tracks are obtained using a downscaling technique with large-scale environmental fields from a subset of these models. Here, for both configurations, tracks are objectively separated into four groups using a cluster technique, leading to a zonal and a meridional separation of the tracks. The meridional separation largely captures the separation between deep tropical and subtropical, hybrid or baroclinic cyclones, while the zonal separation segregates Gulf of Mexico and Cape Verde storms. The properties of the tracks’ seasonality, intensity, and power dissipation index in each cluster are documented for both configurations. The authors’ results show that, except for the seasonality, the downscaled tracks better capture the observed characteristics of the clusters. The authors also use three different idealized scenarios to examine the possible future changes of tropical cyclone tracks under 1) warming sea surface temperature, 2) increasing carbon dioxide, and 3) a combination of the two. The response to each scenario is highly variable depending on the simulation considered. Lastly, the authors examine the role of each cluster in these future changes and find no preponderant contribution of any single cluster over the others.

Research Organization:
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL), Berkeley, CA (United States)
Sponsoring Organization:
USDOE Office of Science (SC), Biological and Environmental Research (BER); National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA); National Science Foundation (NSF); National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)
Grant/Contract Number:
AC02-05CH11231; NA11OAR4310093; AGS1143959; NNX09AK34G
OSTI ID:
1407300
Journal Information:
Journal of Climate, Vol. 28, Issue 4; ISSN 0894-8755
Publisher:
American Meteorological SocietyCopyright Statement
Country of Publication:
United States
Language:
English
Citation Metrics:
Cited by: 44 works
Citation information provided by
Web of Science

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Cited By (14)

Tropical cyclones in the GISS ModelE2 journal July 2016
Projected changes in ENSO-driven regional tropical cyclone tracks journal January 2020
Cluster analysis of tropical cyclones affecting the Taiwan Strait journal March 2019
Evaluation of a unique approach to high-resolution climate modeling using the Model for Prediction Across Scales – Atmosphere (MPAS-A) version 5.1 journal January 2019
Western North Pacific Tropical Cyclone Model Tracks in Present and Future Climates text January 2017
Tropical cyclones in climate models: Tropical cyclones in climate models journal November 2015
Global warming changes tropical cyclone translation speed journal January 2020
Intense Hurricane Activity Over the Past 1500 Years at South Andros Island, The Bahamas journal November 2019
Rainfall from tropical cyclones: high-resolution simulations and seasonal forecasts journal September 2018
Projected changes in medicanes in the HadGEM3 N512 high-resolution global climate model journal December 2015
Projections of southern hemisphere tropical cyclone track density using CMIP5 models journal October 2018
Impact of Anthropogenic Climate Change on United States Major Hurricane Landfall Frequency journal May 2019
Tropical cyclones in climate models text January 2016
Tropical cyclones in the GISS ModelE2 text January 2016

Figures / Tables (17)

FIG. 1(p. 4)figure FIG. 1
FIG. 2(p. 6)figure FIG. 2
TABLE 1(p. 7)table TABLE 1
FIG. 3(p. 8)figure FIG. 3
TABLE 2(p. 8)table TABLE 2
FIG. 4(p. 10)figure FIG. 4
TABLE 3(p. 11)table TABLE 3
FIG. 5(p. 12)figure FIG. 5
FIG. 6.(p. 14)figure FIG. 6.
TABLE 4(p. 15)table TABLE 4
FIG. 7(p. 17)figure FIG. 7
FIG. 8(p. 18)figure FIG. 8
TABLE 5(p. 19)table TABLE 5
FIG. 9(p. 22)figure FIG. 9
FIG. 10(p. 23)figure FIG. 10
FIG. 11(p. 24)figure FIG. 11
Table A1(p. 26)table Table A1

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54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES
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