NICOP - Climate projections of tropical cyclone activity over the Caribbean and East Pacific regions from an ensemble of regional climate simulations
Abstract
Tropical cyclones (TC) are among the most dangerous atmospheric phenomena causing great property damage and lost of human lives. The"re is statistically significant evidence that a global warming has occurred in past several decades at the Earth s surface. However," how the present global warming have been affecting tropical cyclones and also how tropical cyclones will be affected by a possible future global warming would need to be addressed.Some studies have shown that the coarse resolution used by typical global climate" models can not represent their complex inner structure, neither their intensities, particularly for the most intense storms. Global"" climate simulations at high-resolution (about 50-, 25-km) have been recently possible. However, global simulations at those resolut"ions and for more than 100 years imply a huge amount of calculations and storage capacity.Regional (limited-area) climate modeling (RCM) is a method used to downscale global climate simulations in order to avoid the limitations of low resolution global climate m"odels. Largedifferences in climate projections have been obtained from different studies, which emphasizethe difficulty of assessi""ng future changes of TC activity, particularly when regional models are used. For this reason, conclusions from a single climate mod""el should be taken with caution, highlighting the necessity of employing ensemble simulations or multimodel intercomparisons. The ma"in goal of this proposal is to asses the behavior of tropical cyclones in climate projections obtained from a multimodel ensemble of Regional Climate Models using different climate scenarios and different global climate models as initial and boundary conditions.R"egional climate simulations will be performed using three different models (PRECIS, RegCMand WRF). Recent past climate simulations"" will be run using reanalysis data (control simulations), which will be validated against observations. Future climate simulations w"ill also be run with initial and boundary conditions provided by different global climate models and different climate scenarios wil"l be assessed. As a result, a large number of simulations will be created comprising an ensemble of regional climate simulations (ab""out 20 members), whose members and ensemble mean will be assessed against observations and reanalysis data.We will study the season""al, interannual and interdecadal variation of TC activity on past recent climate and future climate and will study the impact of dif""ferent model initializations and different climate scenarios on the behavior of TCs in a future warming climate. To accomplish this," a method to track TC-like vortexes in regional climate simulations will be developed and tested. Results from the proposal will hel"p to decrease the uncertainty of the impact a future climate change will have on TC activity, which will help governments in countri""es affected by TCs to be better prepared to face a future climate change.As a result of this proposal, 2 partial reports and a fina""l report will be written. In addition, 3 works will be presented in Conferences and 2 papers will be submitted to a peer-reviewed sc"ientificjournal.
Document Details
- Document Type
- DoD Grant Award
- Publication Date
- Sep 01, 2017
- Source ID
- N629091712098
Entities
People
- Julio Marin
Organizations
- Office of Naval Research
- United States Navy