Centennial‐scale shifts in storm frequency captured in paleohurricane records from The Bahamas arise predominantly from random variability
Name
2020GL091145.pdf
Description
Published version
Size
1.89 MB
Format
Unknown
Checksum (MD5)
1ebe0486946920c0202ac66b8d158115
Author(s)
Wallace, Elizabeth
Coats, S
Emanuel, Kerry Andrew
Donnelly, JP
Date Issued
2021
Journal
Geophysical Research Letters
Publisher
American Geophysical Union (AGU)
Version
Final published version
Abstract
© 2020 The Authors. Event-based paleohurricane reconstructions of the last millennium indicate dramatic changes in the frequency of landfalling hurricanes on centennial timescales. It is difficult to assess whether the variability captured in these paleorecords is related to changing climate or randomness. We assess whether centennial-scale active and quiet intervals of intense hurricane activity occur in a set of synthetic storms run with boundary conditions from an earth system model simulation of the last millennium. We generate 1,000 pseudo sedimentary records for a site on South Andros Island using a Poisson random draw from this synthetic storm data set. We find that any single pseudo sedimentary record contains active and quiet intervals of hurricane activity. The 1,000-record ensemble average, which reflects the common signal of climate variability, does not. This suggests that the record of paleohurricane activity from The Bahamas reflects variability in hurricane frequency dominated by randomness and not variability in the climatic conditions.
MIT Department
Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution
Joint Program in Oceanography
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Program in Atmospheres, Oceans, and Climate
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences
Terms of Use
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license
Persistent DSpace Link
DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1029/2020GL091145
