Science Source

Kieran T. Bhatia, Gabriel A. Vecchi, Thomas R. Knutson, Hiroyuki Murakami, James Kossin, Keith W. Dixon, Carolyn E. Whitlock

Nature Communications

Published date February 7, 2019

Recent increases in tropical cyclone intensification rates

States that rapidly intensifying cyclones are typically associated with the highest forecast errors and cause a disproportionate amount of human and financial losses
Authors utilize two observational datasets to calculate 24-hour wind speed changes over the period 1982–2009
They compare the observed trends to natural variability in bias-corrected, high-resolution, global coupled model experiments that accurately simulate the climatological distribution of tropical cyclone intensification
Both observed datasets show significant increases in tropical cyclone intensification rates in the Atlantic basin that are highly unusual compared to model-based estimates of internal climate variations
Our results suggest a detectable increase of Atlantic intensification rates with a positive contribution from anthropogenic forcing and reveal a need for more reliable data before detecting a robust trend at the global scale