The Tropical Cyclone Climate Model Intercomparison Project

Abstract

In this chapter, a review is given of progress to date on an intercomparison project designed to compare and evaluate the ability of climate models to generate tropical cyclones, the Tropical Cyclone climate Model Intercomparison Project (TC-MIP). Like other intercomparison projects, this project aims to evaluate climate models using common metrics in order to make suggestions regarding future development of such models. A brief summary is given of the current ability of these models and some initial conclusions are made. Coarser-resolution climate models appear to have difficulty simulating tropical formation in the Atlantic basin, but simply increasing the resolution of such models does not necessarily lead to improved simulations in this region. The choice of convective scheme is also important in determining the tropical cyclone formation rate. There appears to be little relationship between the simulated details of the large-scale climate and model tropical cyclone formation rates, and possible reasons are given for this. Recent fine-resolution models have shown considerable improvement in their simulation of both global and Atlantic tropical cyclone formation, leading to the possibility that such models could be used for detection and attribution studies of the causes of observed changes in tropical cyclone formation rate, particularly in the Atlantic basin.