Hurricane Frances in Florida: Past and Future

Abstract

Tropical cyclones (TC) are common high-impact weather events in the southeastern United States. One of the most intense TCs to hit north-central Florida in recent decades was Hurricane Frances (2004), which resulted in over $10B in damages. Given the growing concern about the relationship between anthropogenic climate change, precipitation, and TCs, we investigated how a Hurricane Frances-like event would affect north-central Florida in the late 21st century under an RCP- 8.5 scenario. Using a ‘pseudo’ global warming dataset based on the high-resolution Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model, we explore historical and future simulations of Hurricane Frances’s path, precipitation rates, and wind speeds. We discover that, across north-central Florida sub-daily to daily rainfall totals in the future simulation exceed that of the historical, having return period events in some cases reaching 500-year thresholds. We also find more broadly across the spatial domain of the hurricane that rainfall rates in all temporal categories and total rainfall accumulation increased significantly. Results for wind speeds were mixed, with an evident expansion of tropical storm winds, but a slight contraction of the spatial extent of strongest winds at the surface. We discuss the implications of these findings for decision-makers in Florida.