Hurricanes and Climate: The U.S. CLIVAR Working Group on Hurricanes
Name
Walsh-2015-Hurricanes and clima.pdf
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5.77 MB
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Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
a17f6df2dd6bdad7a88d3a7f7ac4351d
Author(s)
Emanuel, Kerry Andrew
Date Issued
June 2015
Journal
Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society
Publisher
American Meteorological Society
Citation
Walsh, Kevin J. E., Suzana J. Camargo, Gabriel A. Vecchi, Anne Sophie Daloz, James Elsner, Kerry Emanuel, Michael Horn, et al. “Hurricanes and Climate: The U.S. CLIVAR Working Group on Hurricanes.” Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society 96, no. 6 (June 2015): 997–1017. © 2015 American Meteorological Society
Version
Final published version
Abstract
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. 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.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences
Terms of Use
Article is made available in accordance with the publisher's policy and may be subject to US copyright law. Please refer to the publisher's site for terms of use.
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DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1175/BAMS-D-13-00242.1
