Hurricanes and Climate: The U.S. CLIVAR Working Group on Hurricanes

Journal Article · Mon Jun 01 00:00:00 EDT 2015 · Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1175/BAMS-D-13-00242.1· OSTI ID:1407302

Walsh, Kevin J. E. ^[1]; Camargo, Suzana J. ^[2]; Vecchi, Gabriel A. ^[3]; Daloz, Anne Sophie ^[4]; Elsner, James ^[5]; Emanuel, Kerry ^[6]; Horn, Michael ^[1]; Lim, Young-Kwon ^[7]; Roberts, Malcolm ^[8]; Patricola, Christina ^[9]; Scoccimarro, Enrico ^[10]; Sobel, Adam H. ^[2]; Strazzo, Sarah ^[5]; Villarini, Gabriele ^[11]; Wehner, Michael ^[12]; Zhao, Ming ^[3]; Kossin, James P. ^[13]; LaRow, Tim ^[5]; Oouchi, Kazuyoshi ^[14]; Schubert, Siegfried ^[7] ; Wang, Hui ^[15]; Bacmeister, Julio ^[16]; Chang, Ping ^[17]; Chauvin, Fabrice ^[18]; Jablonowski, Christiane ^[19]; Kumar, Arun ^[15]; Murakami, Hiroyuki ^[3]; Ose, Tomoaki ^[20]; Reed, Kevin A. ^[16]; Saravanan, Ramalingam ^[17]; Yamada, Yohei ^[14]; Zarzycki, Colin M. ^[19]; Vidale, Pier Luigi ^[21]; Jonas, Jeffrey A. ^[22]; Henderson, Naomi ^[2]

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1. Univ. of Melbourne, Parkville, Vic (Australia)
2. Columbia Univ., New York, NY (United States). Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory
3. Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Lab., Princeton, NJ (United States)
4. Univ. of Wisconsin, Madison, WI (United States). Space Science and Engineering Center
5. Florida State Univ., Tallahassee, FL (United States)
6. Massachusetts Inst. of Technology (MIT), Cambridge, MA (United States)
7. NASA Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC), Greenbelt, MD (United States). Global Modeling and Assimilation Office
8. Met Office, Exeter (United Kingdom)
9. Texas A & M Univ. College Station, TX (United States)
10. Istituto Nazionale di Geofisica e Vulcanologia, and Centro Euro-Mediterraneo sui Cambiamenti Climatici, Bologna (Italy)
11. Univ. of Iowa, Iowa City, IA (United States)
12. Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. (LBNL), Berkeley, CA (United States)
13. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), Asheville, NC (United States). National Climatic Data Center (NCDC)
14. Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology (JAMSTEC), Kanagawa (Japan)
15. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), College Park, MD (United States). National Centers for Environmental Prediction (NCEP)
16. National Center for Atmospheric Research, Boulder, CO (United States)
17. Texas A & M Univ., College Station, TX (United States)
18. Meteo-France, Toulouse (France)
19. Univ. of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI (United States)
20. Japan Meteorological Agency, sukuba-city, Ibaraki (Japan)
21. Univ. of Reading, Reading (United Kingdom)
22. NASA Goddard Inst. for Space Studies (GISS), New York, NY (United States); Columbia Univ., New York, NY (United States)

While a quantitative climate theory of tropical cyclone formation remains elusive, considerable progress has been made recently in our ability to simulate tropical cyclone climatologies and to understand the relationship between climate and tropical cyclone formation. Climate models are now able to simulate a realistic rate of global tropical cyclone formation, although simulation of the Atlantic tropical cyclone climatology remains challenging unless horizontal resolutions finer than 50 km are employed. This article summarizes published research from the idealized experiments of the Hurricane Working Group of U.S. Climate and Ocean: Variability, Predictability and Change (CLIVAR). This work, combined with results from other model simulations, has strengthened relationships between tropical cyclone formation rates and climate variables such as midtropospheric vertical velocity, with decreased climatological vertical velocities leading to decreased tropical cyclone formation. Systematic differences are shown between experiments in which only sea surface temperature is increased compared with experiments where only atmospheric carbon dioxide is increased. Experiments where only carbon dioxide is increased are more likely to demonstrate a decrease in tropical cyclone numbers, similar to the decreases simulated by many climate models for a future, warmer climate. Experiments where the two effects are combined also show decreases in numbers, but these tend to be less for models that demonstrate a strong tropical cyclone response to increased sea surface temperatures. Lastly, further experiments are proposed that may improve our understanding of the relationship between climate and tropical cyclone formation, including experiments with two-way interaction between the ocean and the atmosphere and variations in atmospheric aerosols.

• Research Organization: Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL), Berkeley, CA (United States)
• Sponsoring Organization: USDOE Office of Science (SC), Biological and Environmental Research (BER) (SC-23)
• Grant/Contract Number: AC02-05CH11231
• OSTI ID: 1407302
• Journal Information: Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, Journal Name: Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society Journal Issue: 6 Vol. 96; ISSN 0003-0007
• Publisher: American Meteorological Society
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English

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