Present and Future Climate Simulations of North Atlantic Tropical Cyclones using a Dynamically-Downscaled, Convection-Permitting Regional Climate Model

Tropical Cyclones (TCs) are among the costliest and most destructive weather phenomena to threaten the North Atlantic coast, endangering lives, property, and essential resources such as offshore and coastal energy activities. Significant uncertainty exists regarding TC response to a warming climate, partly due to a lack of decadal-scale future climate simulations at resolutions fine enough to adequately resolve the physical processes (e.g., convection, planetary boundary layer) driving TCs. This data is crucial to our understanding of the possible climatological changes to TC tracks, intensity, and structure, especially for scientists and policymakers seeking to mitigate and adapt to future TC damages.

Our study uses model output from Argonne Downscaled Data Archive (ADDA), building on previous performance evaluations of its ability to simulate North Atlantic TCs. ADDA is a database of decadal-scale, convection-permitting model output from the Weather Research and Forecasting Model (WRF) across all of North America, from Alaska to Puerto Rico and the surrounding oceans.

We compare output from two CESM forced, 4km horizontal resolution simulations: a historical period from 1995-2015, and business-as-usual (SSP5/8.5) scenario for the years 2040-2060. TCs are tracked with a topological based and physics-informed tracking algorithm, TROPHY (Yan et al., 2023). Our poster examines various climatological statistics such as track, intensity, frequency, accumulated cyclone energy and translational speed, and analyses the variation in such TC characteristics between the two climate periods, thus demonstrating an essential function of the ADDA data product.

References:
Lin Yan, Hanqi Guo, Thomas Peterka, Bei Wang, & Jiali Wang. (2023). TROPHY: A Topologically Robust Physics-Informed Tracking Framework for Tropical Cyclones. https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.15243