An Investigation of Bomb Cyclone Climatology: Reanalysis vs. NCEP's CFS Model

With the concerns, impacts and consequences of climate change increasing, the need for climate models to simulate daily weather is very important. Given the improvements in resolution and physical parameterizations, climate models are becoming capable of resolving extreme weather events. A particular type of extreme event which has large impacts on transportation, industry and the general public is a rapidly intensifying cyclone referred to as a “bomb.” To investigate bombs, we generate storm tracks based on 6-hourly sea-level pressure (SLP) from reanalysis data and long-term climate runs of the CFS model. From these datasets, we develop a global bomb climatology for the reanalysis data and the CFS model runs. A comparison of the observed and simulated bomb climatologies is done to assess whether the CFS model is capable of producing bombs. To examine whether model-generated bombs are physically realistic, we also show a case study of a bomb in the CFS model via diagnostics such as 500 hPa heights, vorticity, SLP, and winds. Future work will focus on trends in their frequency and intensity so that an assessment of the potential role of bombs in climate change can be assessed.