Climate Change and Hurricane-Like Extratropical Cyclones: Projections for North Atlantic Polar Lows and Medicanes Based on CMIP5 Models

Abstract

A novel statistical–deterministic method is applied to generate thousands of synthetic tracks of North Atlantic (NA) polar lows and Mediterranean hurricanes (“medicanes”); these synthetic storms are compatible with the climates simulated by 30 CMIP5 models in both historical and RCP8.5 simulations for a recent (1986–2005) and a future (2081–2100) period, respectively. Present-to-future multimodel mean changes in storm risk are analyzed, with special attention to robust patterns (in terms of consensus among individual models) and privileging in each case the subset of models exhibiting the highest agreement with the results yielded by two reanalyses. A reduction of about 10%–15% in the overall frequency of NA polar lows that would uniformly affect the full spectrum of storm intensities is expected. In addition, a very robust regional redistribution of cases is obtained, namely a tendency to shift part of the polar low activity from the south Greenland–Icelandic sector toward the Nordic seas closer to Scandinavia. In contrast, the future change in the number of medicanes is unclear (on average the total frequency of storms does not vary), but a profound reshaping of the spectrum of lifetime maximum winds is found; the results project a higher number of moderate and violent medicanes at the expense of weak storms. Spatially, the method projects an increased occurrence of medicanes in the western Mediterranean and Black Sea that is balanced by a reduction of storm tracks in contiguous areas, particularly in the central Mediterranean; however, future extreme events (winds > 60 kt; 1 kt = 0.51 m s⁻¹) become more probable in all Mediterranean subbasins.