Abstract
The recent global warming hiatus (GWH) was characterized by a La Niña–like cooling in the tropical Eastern Pacific accompanied with the Indian Ocean and the tropical Atlantic Ocean warming. Here we show that the recent GWH contributed significantly to the increased occurrence of intense tropical cyclones in the coastal regions along East Asia since 1998. The GWH associated sea surface temperature anomalies triggered a pair of anomalous cyclonic and anticyclonic circulations and equatorial easterly anomalies over the Northwest Pacific, which favored TC genesis and intensification over the western Northwest Pacific but suppressed TC genesis and intensification over the southeastern Northwest Pacific due to increased vertical wind shear and anticyclonic circulation anomalies. Results from atmospheric general circulation model experiments demonstrate that the Pacific La Niña–like cooling dominated the Indian Ocean and the tropical Atlantic Ocean warming in contributing to the observed GWH-related anomalous atmospheric circulation over the Northwest Pacific.
Highlights
Tropical cyclones (TCs) can cause enormously devastating losses of human life and property damages, especially for coastal areas, including China, Korea, and Japan over East Asia[1,2,3]
To confirm the reliability of the trend analysis based on the Joint Typhoon Warning Center (JTWC) TC best-track dataset, we compared the trends in ITC tracks (ITCTs) based on the advanced Dvorak technique (ADT)-HURSAT dataset and on the JTWC TC best-track dataset during 1982–2009 in Fig. 1c and d, respectively
The trend patterns from the two datasets are very similar to each other, suggesting that the analysis based on the JTWC TC best-track data is reliable and independent of the TC best-track dataset used
Summary
Tropical cyclones (TCs) can cause enormously devastating losses of human life and property damages, especially for coastal areas, including China, Korea, and Japan over East Asia[1,2,3]. This westward shift of prevailing TC tracks has been attributed to the expansion of subtropical high over the Northwest Pacific and local ocean surface warming[3,17,18] Since both the increase in landfalling ITCs and the westward shift in TC tracks over the Northwest Pacific imply the increasing threat by more ITCs to the coastal regions of the East Asian countries, it is important to further explore the regional change in ITC occurrences and understand possible mechanisms that contributed to the related regional change based on a perspective of global SST anomalies. Regardless of its triggering mechanisms, the GWH has been demonstrated to have imposed important impact on the North American climate and the Asian monsoon variability[29,30]
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