Abstract

Tropical cyclones are among the most damaging and fatal extreme weather events. An increase in Atlantic tropical cyclone activity has been observed, but attribution to global warming remains challenging due to large inter-annual variability and modelling challenges. Here we show that the increase in Atlantic tropical cyclone activity since the 1980s can be robustly ascribed to changes in atmospheric circulation as well as sea surface temperature (SST) increase. Using a novel weather pattern based statistical model, we find that the forced warming trend in Atlantic SSTs over the 1982–2018 period increased the probability of extremely active tropical cyclone seasons by 14 %. Seasonal atmospheric circulation remains the dominant factor explaining both inter-annual variability and the observed increase. Our weather pattern-based statistical decomposition helps to understand the role of atmospheric variability for the Atlantic tropical cyclone activity and provides a new perspective on the role of ocean warming.

Highlights

  • Tropical cyclones (TCs) are highly destructive extreme weather events (MunichRe, 2021), with a notable increase in intensity and associated damages over recent decades (Kossin et al, 2013, 2020; Holland and Bruyère, 2014; Knutson et al, 2019)

  • We have demonstrated that the observed Atlantic tropical cyclone activity over the last 40 years can be reproduced with a probabilistic emulator based on large-scale weather patterns and sea surface temperature (SST)

  • We observe a trend in weather patterns 240 favoring more active TC seasons

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Summary

Introduction

Tropical cyclones (TCs) are highly destructive extreme weather events (MunichRe, 2021), with a notable increase in intensity and associated damages over recent decades (Kossin et al, 2013, 2020; Holland and Bruyère, 2014; Knutson et al, 2019). This study followed the story-line approach in which dynamical conditions of the weather event are reproduced for different counterfactual thermodynamic forcings. Such approaches are restricted to individual events with clearly defined atmospheric conditions and cannot be directly generalized to seasonal TC activity (Reed et al, 2020). We find that the sequence of weather patterns throughout the main hurricane season (August-October) explains most of the inter-annual variability in number of storms and their intensities. S7) as an amplifying factor for most intense TCs. Using counterfactual experiments, we investigate the extent to which trends in Atlantic SSTs contribute to 45 highly active tropical cyclone seasons under current climatic conditions

Data & Preprocessing
Daily tropical Atlantic weather patterns and sea surface temperatures
Storm duration
Storm intensity
Results
Sensitivity analysis
Discussion and conclusions
280 References
Full Text
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