7Tropical Attributing the Impacts of Future Ocean Warming Over the Gulf of Mexico on Landfalling Hurricanes Over the Texas Coast

Hurricanes pose significant risks, including fatalities and billions of dollars in damages. While evidence suggests that future hurricanes may intensify due to climate change, our understanding of how climate change affects these storms, particularly the roles of atmospheric, land, and ocean environments, remains limited. To address this gap, coupled ocean-atmosphere models are used to study the responses of Hurricanes Ike (2008) and Harvey (2017)—two hazardous hurricanes with different evolution characteristics, including their tracks across the Gulf of Mexico and their landfall intensities on the Texas Coast—under a future climate change scenario using 10 CMIP6 model-based Pseudo-Global Warming (PGW) approach, which includes increasing complexity in atmosphere-land-ocean interactions.

The results indicate that the responses of both hurricanes vary with changes in atmospheric, land, and ocean environments under future climate scenarios. Future ocean warming over the Gulf of Mexico has the most significant impact, enhancing hurricane intensity, with the central sea level pressure of landfalling hurricanes dropping by more than 50 hPa compared to historical observations. Hurricanes increase in intensity with vertically uniform atmospheric warming. However, they rapidly decrease in intensity when only considering future vertically non-uniform atmospheric warming due to vertical temperature inversion (i.e., warmer temperature changes in the upper troposphere than in the lower troposphere), which strengthens atmospheric stability and inhibits hurricane development. Future land warming has a negligible impact on hurricane intensity but significantly alters hurricane landfall locations through changes in large-scale circulation patterns. Further analysis will explore the detailed processes driving these changes, providing insights into disaster prevention and adaptation strategies for Texas Coast communities.