Nam-Young Kang & James B. Elsner

Nature Climate Change

Published date May 15, 2015

Trade-off between intensity and frequency of global tropical cyclones

  • Improves understanding of global warming’s influence on tropical cyclone climate
  • Forms a complete three-dimensional variability space of tropical cyclone climate where the variabilities are continuously linked
  • Finds that global ocean warmth best explains the out-of-phase relationship between intensity and frequency of global tropical cyclones
  • Calculates an average increase in global tropical cyclone intensity of 1.3 m s−1 over the past 30 years of ocean warming occurring at the expense of 6.1 tropical cyclones worldwide