Tropical cyclones in the UPSCALE ensemble of high resolution global climate models

• Published in: Journal of Climate
• Main Authors: Roberts, Malcolm J., Vidale, Pier Luigi, Mizielinski, Matthew S., Demory, Marie-Estelle, Schiemann, Reinhard, Strachan, Jane, Hodges, Kevin, Bel, Ray, Camp, Joanne
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: American Meteorological Society 2015
• Subjects: Pacific; North Atlantic
• Online Access: https://centaur.reading.ac.uk/38290/; https://centaur.reading.ac.uk/38290/1/jcli-d-14-00131%252E1.pdf; https://doi.org/10.1175/JCLI-D-14-00131.1

The UPSCALE (UK on PRACE: weather-resolving Simulations of Climate for globAL Environmental risk) project, using PRACE (Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe) resources, constructed and ran an ensemble of atmosphere-only global climate model simulations, using the Met Office Unified Model GA3 configuration. Each simulation is 27 years in length for both the present climate and an end-of-century future climate, at resolutions of N96 (130 km), N216 (60 km) and N512 (25 km), in order to study the impact of model resolution on high impact climate features such as tropical cyclones. Increased model resolution is found to improve the simulated frequency of explicitly tracked tropical cyclones, and correlations of interannual variability in the North Atlantic and North West Pacific lie between 0.6 and 0.75. Improvements in the deficit of genesis in the eastern North Atlantic as resolution increases appear to be related to the representation of African Easterly Waves and the African Easterly Jet. However, the intensity of the modelled tropical cyclones as measured by 10 m wind speed remain weak, and there is no indication of convergence over this range of resolutions. In the future climate ensemble, there is a reduction of 50% in the frequency of Southern Hemisphere tropical cyclones, while in the Northern Hemisphere there is a reduction in the North Atlantic, and a shift in the Pacific with peak intensities becoming more common in the Central Pacific. There is also a change in tropical cyclone intensities, with the future climate having fewer weak storms and proportionally more stronger storms