Grey swan tropical cyclones
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KE 2015_GreySwanTCs_combined-1.pdf
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10.78 MB
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Author(s)
Lin, Ning
Emanuel, Kerry Andrew
Date Issued
August 2015
Journal
Nature Climate Change
Publisher
Nature Publishing Group
Citation
Lin, Ning, and Kerry Emanuel. “Grey Swan Tropical Cyclones.” Nature Climate Change 6, no. 1 (August 31, 2015): 106–111.
Version
Author's final manuscript
Abstract
We define ‘grey swan’ tropical cyclones as high-impact storms that would not be predicted based on history but may be foreseeable using physical knowledge together with historical data. Here we apply a climatological–hydrodynamic method to estimate grey swan tropical cyclone storm surge threat for three highly vulnerable coastal regions. We identify a potentially large risk in the Persian Gulf, where tropical cyclones have never been recorded, and larger-than-expected threats in Cairns, Australia, and Tampa, Florida. Grey swan tropical cyclones striking Tampa, Cairns and Dubai can generate storm surges of about 6 m, 5.7 m and 4 m, respectively, with estimated annual exceedance probabilities of about 1/10,000. With climate change, these probabilities can increase significantly over the twenty-first century (to 1/3,100–1/1,100 in the middle and 1/2,500–1/700 towards the end of the century for Tampa). Worse grey swan tropical cyclones, inducing surges exceeding 11 m in Tampa and 7 m in Dubai, are also revealed with non-negligible probabilities, especially towards the end of the century.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences
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Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike
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DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1038/nclimate2777
