Abstract
The severity of a tropical cyclone (TC) is often summarized by its lifetime maximum intensity (LMI), and the climatological LMI distribution is a fundamental feature of the climate system. The distinctive bimodality of the LMI distribution means that major storms (LMI >96 kt) are not very rare compared with less intense storms. Rapid intensification (RI) is the dramatic strengthening of a TC in a short time, and is notoriously difficult to forecast or simulate. Here we show that the bimodality of the LMI distribution reflects two types of storms: those that undergo RI during their lifetime (RI storms) and those that do not (non-RI storms). The vast majority (79%) of major storms are RI storms. Few non-RI storms (6%) become major storms. While the importance of RI has been recognized in weather forecasting, our results demonstrate that RI also plays a crucial role in the TC climatology.
Highlights
The severity of a tropical cyclone (TC) is often summarized by its lifetime maximum intensity (LMI), and the climatological LMI distribution is a fundamental feature of the climate system
Basin distributions of LMI are bimodal with local maxima around 45 and 120–135 kt except for the Atlantic where there is only a hint of a second maximum (Fig. 2), similar to what is shown in the literature[11]
The observed LMI distribution shows that category 3 and 4 storms are more common than category 1 and 2 storms
Summary
The severity of a tropical cyclone (TC) is often summarized by its lifetime maximum intensity (LMI), and the climatological LMI distribution is a fundamental feature of the climate system. A recent study, on the other hand, proposed a parameterization of the ratio of surface exchange coefficients Ck/Cd, which appears in potential intensity theory[14,15], as a function of wind speed with a local maximum around 115 kt, and speculated that such a maximum would be favourable for rapid intensification (RI) and might explain the bimodal distribution of LMI5. Storms reaching the highest intensities in the western North Pacific[21] and North Atlantic[22] typically do so after undergoing RI at least once We extend these results to all basins, and show explicitly that RI explains the bimodality of the LMI distribution. We separate storms into two groups: those that undergo RI during their lifetime (RI storms) and those that do not (non-RI storms)
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