Abstract
Historical records of Atlantic hurricane activity, extending back to 1851, show increasing activity over time, but much or all of this trend has been attributed to lack of observations in the early portion of the record. Here we use a tropical cyclone downscaling model driven by three global climate analyses that are based mostly on sea surface temperature and surface pressure data. The results support earlier statistically-based inferences that storms were undercounted in the 19th century, but in contrast to earlier work, show increasing tropical cyclone activity through the period, interrupted by a prominent hurricane drought in the 1970s and 80 s that we attribute to anthropogenic aerosols. In agreement with earlier work, we show that most of the variability of North Atlantic tropical cyclone activity over the last century was directly related to regional rather than global climate change. Most metrics of tropical cyclones downscaled over all the tropics show weak and/or insignificant trends over the last century, illustrating the special nature of North Atlantic tropical cyclone climatology.
Highlights
Historical records of Atlantic hurricane activity, extending back to 1851, show increasing activity over time, but much or all of this trend has been attributed to lack of observations in the early portion of the record
The CERA20C reanalysis differs from the NOAA reanalyses in assimilating marine surface winds and assimilating data into a coupled oceanatmosphere model
I created 100 North Atlantic and 100 global tropical cyclone tracks for each year in each reanalysis, recording the frequency as proportional to the ratio of successful to net seeds, as in previously published work[11,12,13]. Details of these reanalyses and the downscaling technique are described in the Methods section
Summary
Historical records of Atlantic hurricane activity, extending back to 1851, show increasing activity over time, but much or all of this trend has been attributed to lack of observations in the early portion of the record. We present results of an alternative approach to estimating past hurricane activity, based on dynamical downscaling of three climate reanalyses, spanning more than a century and assimilating only surface pressure, sea ice, ocean surface temperature observations, and in one case, marine surface winds.
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