Science Source

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