Reed, Andra J., Mann, Michael E., Emanuel, Kerry A., Titley, David W.

Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres

Published date August 8, 2015

An analysis of long-term relationships among count statistics and metrics of synthetic tropical cyclones downscaled from CMIP5 models

  • States the impact of tropical cyclones in a changing climate on the United States Atlantic and Gulf Coasts will be affected both by how intense and how frequent these storms become
  • States the observational record of tropical cyclones in the Atlantic Basin is too short (A.D. 1851 to present) to allow for accurate assessment of low-frequency variability in storm activity
  • Downscales four Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 5 models to generate synthetic tropical cyclone data sets for the Atlantic Basin that span the interval of A.D. 850–2005
  • Uses these long-term synthetic tropical cyclone data sets to investigate the relationship between power dissipation and ocean temperature metrics, as well as the relationship between basin-wide and landfalling tropical cyclone count statistics over the past millennium
  • Finds only a very weak relationship between power dissipation and main development region sea surface temperature in the Atlantic Basin, contrary to previous studies
  • Finds—consistent with previous studies—that basin-wide and landfalling tropical cyclone counts are significantly correlated with one another, lending further support for the use of paleohurricane landfall records to infer long-term basin-wide tropical cyclone trends