- Title
- A statistical assessment of Southern Hemisphere tropical cyclone tracks in climate models
- Creator
- Ramsay, Hamish; Chand, Savin; Camargo, Suzana
- Date
- 2018
- Type
- Text; Journal article
- Identifier
- http://researchonline.federation.edu.au/vital/access/HandleResolver/1959.17/166867
- Identifier
- vital:13539
- Identifier
-
https://doi.org/10.1175/JCLI-D-18-0377.1
- Identifier
- ISBN:0894-8755
- Abstract
- Reliable projections of future changes in tropical cyclone (TC) characteristics are highly dependent on the ability of global climate models (GCMs) to simulate the observed characteristics of TCs (i.e., their frequency, genesis locations, movement, and intensity). Here, we investigate the performance of a suite of GCMs from the U.S. CLIVAR Working Group on Hurricanes in simulating observed climatological features of TCs in the Southern Hemisphere. A subset of these GCMs is also explored under three idealized warming scenarios. Two types of simulated TC tracks are evaluated on the basis of a commonly applied cluster analysis: 1) explicitly simulated tracks, and 2) downscaled tracks, derived from a statistical-dynamical technique that depends on the models' large-scale environmental fields. Climatological TC properties such as genesis locations, annual frequency, lifetime maximum intensity (LMI), and seasonality are evaluated for both track types. Future changes to annual frequency, LMI, and the latitude of LMI are evaluated using the downscaled tracks where large sample sizes allow for statistically robust results. An ensemble approach is used to assess future changes of explicit tracks owing to their small number of realizations. We show that the downscaled tracks generally outperform the explicit tracks in relation to many of the climatological features of Southern Hemisphere TCs, despite a few notable biases. Future changes to the frequency and intensity of TCs in the downscaled simulations are found to be highly dependent on the warming scenario and model, with the most robust result being an increase in the LMI under a uniform 2°C surface warming.
- Publisher
- American Meteorological Society
- Relation
- Journal of Climate Vol. 31, no. 24 (2018), p. 10081-10104
- Rights
- Copyright © 2018 American Meteorological Society.
- Rights
- Open Access
- Rights
- This metadata is freely available under a CCO license
- Subject
- 0401 Atmospheric Sciences; 0405 Oceanography; 0909 Geomatic Engineering; Climate models; Climatology; Hurricanes/typhoons; Model comparison; Model evaluation/performance
- Full Text
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