Effect of SST and ENSO on western North Pacific tropical cyclone landfall via changes in genesis

Evolution in landfall rates of intense tropical cyclones (TCs) is of major concern to coastal populations and policy makers. We are developing a statistical model of western North Pacific TCs to estimate the sensitivity of East-Asia landfall to large-scale climate state. The model is based on the 1945-2007 International Best Track Archive for Climate Stewardship track data. TC genesis is modeled by local Poisson regression on basin-averaged SST and ENSO state with optimized averaging length-scale, resulting in a climate-sensitive spatially-resolved field of formation rates. For TC propagation, we compute local means and variances of 6-hourly displacements using optimized averaging kernels and treat the residuals as autoregressive. We use the model to generate 1000s of years of stochastic TCs for a range of fixed SST and ENSO values, from which we compute the SST- and ENSO-dependent regional landfall rates.