Resolving long-term variations in North Atlantic hurricane activity over the past millennium using a pseudo proxy network approach
Abstract
Anthropogenic climate change has the potential to dramatically alter tropical cyclone risk to coastal communities. Unfortunately, our understanding of how tropical cyclone activity will transform with changing climate is hindered by a short observational record. Paleohurricane studies use natural archives to extend the observational record of tropical cyclones back thousands of years. However, these records are biased capturing only proximal-passing intense hurricanes at varying resolutions. In this work, we devise two pseudo proxy networks encompassing the full suite of published paleohurricane studies in the North Atlantic. We pass a large set of statistically downscaled storms forced with two global climate model simulations of the past millennium (Max Planck Institute (MPI), Community Earth System Model (CESM)) through each pseudo network to assess the theoretical skill of paleohurricane proxies at capturing low frequency variability in North Atlantic basin-wide and intra-basin tropical cyclones. We find that basin-wide and paleohurricane compiled tropical cyclone counts are significantly correlated with one another for the past millennium on annual to multi-decadal timescales. However, current paleohurricane proxy networks predominantly document storms passing through the Caribbean/Gulf of Mexico. More paleohurricane records, especially from the U.S. Southeast, are needed to reconstruct recurving tropical cyclones. Our findings lend support for the use of paleohurricane records to infer long-term basin-wide tropical cyclone frequency.
- Publication:
-
AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2021
- Bibcode:
- 2021AGUFMPP54A..06W