Warming-induced historical (1871-present) and future increase in tropical cyclone rapid intensification.

Rapidly intensifying tropical cyclones, storms whose intensity increases by a large amount over a matter of hours, are a particularly hazardous concern in regions impacted by TCs. Therefore, understanding and predicting the statistics of hurricane rapid intensification is a topic of great societal signiQcance. There has been a documented increase in global (and North Atlantic) rapid intensification since the 1980s. We here explore a series of century-scale global climate model simulations (1871-present) that can represent aspects of historical RI statistics and find that the documented increase (both globally and in the Atlantic) is part of a century-scale change (as opposed to multi-decadal fluctuation or change) and is the response to historical sea surface temperature warming. Model projections indicate further increases in the likelihood of rapid intensification in a warming climate. We compare the observed, simulated, and projected changes and show that the increase in global (and North Atlantic) RI represents an emergent global warming signal in a societally-impactful characteristic of tropical cyclones.