Impact of reanalysis boundary conditions on downscaled Atlantic hurricane activity ...

Climate models are capable of producing features similar to tropical cyclones, but typically display strong biases for many of the storm physical characteristics due to their relatively coarse resolution compared to the size of the storms themselves. One strategy that has been adopted to circumvent...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Baudouin, JP, Caron, LP, Boudreault, M
Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
Language:English
Published: Springer Science and Business Media LLC 2019
Subjects:
Online Access:https://dx.doi.org/10.17863/cam.26996
https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/279626
Description
Summary:Climate models are capable of producing features similar to tropical cyclones, but typically display strong biases for many of the storm physical characteristics due to their relatively coarse resolution compared to the size of the storms themselves. One strategy that has been adopted to circumvent this limitation is through the use of a hybrid downscaling technique, wherein a large set of synthetic tracks are created by seeding disturbances in the large-scale environment. Here, we evaluate the ability of this technique at reproducing many of the characteristics of the recent North Atlantic hurricane activity as well as its sensitivity to the choice of the reanalysis dataset used as boundary conditions. In particular, we show that the geographical and intensity distributions are well reproduced, but that the technique has difficulty capturing the large difference in activity observed between the most recent active and quiescent phase. Although the signal is somewhat reduced compared to observation, the ...