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

Journal Article · · Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society
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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)
Grant/Contract Number:
AC02-05CH11231
OSTI ID:
1407302
Journal Information:
Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, Vol. 96, Issue 6; ISSN 0003-0007
Publisher:
American Meteorological SocietyCopyright Statement
Country of Publication:
United States
Language:
English
Citation Metrics:
Cited by: 136 works
Citation information provided by
Web of Science

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Projected changes in tropical cyclone activity under future warming scenarios using a high-resolution climate model journal August 2016
Normalized US hurricane damage estimates using area of total destruction, 1900−2018 journal November 2019
Future Changes of the Monsoon Trough: Sensitivity to Sea Surface Temperature Gradient and Implications for Tropical Cyclone Activity journal June 2018
Western North Pacific Tropical Cyclone Model Tracks in Present and Future Climates text January 2017
Recent increases in tropical cyclone intensification rates journal February 2019
Towards predictive understanding of regional climate change journal September 2015
Rapid attribution of the August 2016 flood-inducing extreme precipitation in south Louisiana to climate change journal January 2017
A comprehensive data set for tropical cyclone storm surge-induced inundation for the east coast of India: DATA SET FOR STORM SURGE AND INUNDATION FOR EAST COAST OF INDIA journal July 2017
An Observational Analysis of Ocean Surface Waves in Tropical Cyclones in the Western North Pacific Ocean journal January 2019
Forecasted attribution of the human influence on Hurricane Florence journal January 2020
High-income does not protect against hurricane losses journal August 2016
Inter‐annual variation of tropical cyclones simulated by GEOS‐5 AGCM with modified convection scheme journal March 2019
Tropical cyclones in the GISS ModelE2 journal July 2016
Impacts of hemispheric solar geoengineering on tropical cyclone frequency journal November 2017
Fine resolution simulations of the effect of climate change on tropical cyclones in the South Pacific journal February 2015
Tropical cyclone sensitivities to CO2 doubling: roles of atmospheric resolution, synoptic variability and background climate changes journal August 2019
Aquaplanet Simulations of Tropical Cyclones journal June 2019
Intensification of landfalling typhoons over the northwest Pacific since the late 1970s journal September 2016
Evaluation of climatological tropical cyclone activity over the western North Pacific in the CORDEX-East Asia multi-RCM simulations journal November 2015
Changes in tropical cyclones under stabilized 1.5 and 2.0 °C global warming scenarios as simulated by the Community Atmospheric Model under the HAPPI protocols journal January 2018
Tropical cyclones and climate change: Tropical cyclones and climate change
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Going Downriver: Patterns and Cues in Hurricane-Driven Movements of Common Snook in a Subtropical Coastal River journal August 2019
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Recent poleward shift of tropical cyclone formation linked to Hadley cell expansion journal July 2018
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Tropical cyclones in the GISS ModelE2 text January 2016