Global Synthetic Tropical Cyclone Generation Under Present and Future Climate Conditions
Abstract
Over the past few decades, the world has seen a drastic increase in tropical cyclone (TC) damages, with for instance last year's hurricanes Harvey, Maria and Irma entering the top 5 costliest hurricanes ever. However, calculating TC risk at a global scale has proven to be difficult, given the limited temporal and spatial information of landfalling TCs around much of the global coastline. In this research, we present a novel approach to calculate TC risk under present and future climate conditions on a global scale. To do this, we use ECMWF's high-resolution (3-hourly, ±0.225° at the equator) model EC-Earth. From 30-years of EC-Earth simulations, we extract 10-meter wind speeds, mean sea-level pressure and ocean surface temperature. We then use synthetic tracking algorithms, i.e. statistically sampling and modeling TC tracks and intensities, to artificially extend the EC-Earth dataset to 10,000 years. From this resulting synthetic TC dataset, we can calculate return periods of TC intensities, precipitation and storm surges (when forcing a global hydrodynamic model with the dataset) along the entire global coastline. Comparing the two datasets may reveal coastal sections that will see an increase in TC risk, which can therefore guide implementation of resilience strategies. Our method has been applied to the model EC-Earth, however it is also easily applicable to any other (global) meteorological datasets or past or future periods.
- Publication:
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AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2018
- Bibcode:
- 2018AGUFMNH41A..02B
- Keywords:
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- 3305 Climate change and variability;
- ATMOSPHERIC PROCESSESDE: 4313 Extreme events;
- NATURAL HAZARDSDE: 4328 Risk;
- NATURAL HAZARDSDE: 4534 Hydrodynamic modeling;
- OCEANOGRAPHY: PHYSICAL