Forecasted attribution of the human influence on Hurricane Florence.

Changes in extreme weather, such as tropical cyclones, are one of the most serious ways society experiences the impact of climate change. Advance forecasted conditional attribution statements, using a numerical model, were made about the anthropogenic climate change influence on an individual tropical cyclone, Hurricane Florence. Mean total overland rainfall amounts associated with the forecasted storm's core were increased by 4.9 ± 4.6% with local maximum amounts experiencing increases of 3.8 ± 5.7% due to climate change. A slight increase in the forecasted storm size of 1 to 2% was also attributed. This work reviews our forecasted attribution statement with the benefit of hindsight, demonstrating credibility of advance attribution statements for tropical cyclones

Diagnosing the influence of diabatic processes on the explosive deepening of extratropical cyclones

A novel version of the classical surface pressure tendency equation (PTE) is applied to ERA-Interim reanalysis data to quantitatively assess the contribution of diabatic processes to the deepening of extratropical cyclones relative to effects of temperature advection and vertical motions. The five cyclone cases selected, Lothar and Martin in December 1999, Kyrill in January 2007, Klaus in January 2009, and Xynthia in February 2010, all showed explosive deepening and brought considerable damage to parts of Europe. For Xynthia, Klaus and Lothar diabatic processes contribute more to the observed surface pressure fall than horizontal temperature advection during their respective explosive deepening phases, while Kyrill and Martin appear to be more baroclinically driven storms. The powerful new diagnostic tool presented here can easily be applied to large numbers of cyclones and will help to better understand the role of diabatic processes in future changes in extratropical storminess

The Extratropical Transition of Tropical Cyclones. Part I: Cyclonic Evolution and Direct Impacts

Extratropical transition (ET) is the process by which a tropical cyclone, upon encountering a baroclinic environment and reduced sea surface temperature at higher latitudes, transforms into an extratropical cyclone. This process is influenced by, and influences, phenomena from the tropics to the midlatitudes and from the meso- to the planetary scales to extents that vary between individual events. Motivated in part by recent high-impact and/or extensively observed events such as North Atlantic Hurricane Sandy in 2012 and western North Pacific Typhoon Sinlaku in 2008, this review details advances in understanding and predicting ET since the publication of an earlier review in 2003. Methods for diagnosing ET in reanalysis, observational, and model-forecast datasets are discussed. New climatologies for the eastern North Pacific and southwest Indian Oceans are presented alongside updates to western North Pacific and North Atlantic Ocean climatologies. Advances in understanding and, in some cases, modeling the direct impacts of ET-related wind, waves, and precipitation are noted. Improved understanding of structural evolution throughout the transformation stage of ET fostered in large part by novel aircraft observations collected in several recent ET events is highlighted. Predictive skill for operational and numerical model ET-related forecasts is discussed along with environmental factors influencing posttransition cyclone structure and evolution. Operational ET forecast and analysis practices and challenges are detailed. In particular, some challenges of effective hazard communication for the evolving threats posed by a tropical cyclone during and after transition are introduced. This review concludes with recommendations for future work to further improve understanding, forecasts, and hazard communication

Serial clustering of extratropical cyclones over the North Atlantic and Europe under recent and future climate conditions

Under particular large-scale atmospheric conditions, several windstorms may affect Europe within a short time period. The occurrence of such cyclone families leads to large socioeconomic impacts and cumulative losses. The serial clustering of windstorms is analyzed for the North Atlantic/western Europe. Clustering is quantified as the dispersion (ratio variance/mean) of cyclone passages over a certain area. Dispersion statistics are derived for three reanalysis data sets and a 20-run European Centre Hamburg Version 5 /Max Planck Institute Version–Ocean Model Version 1 global climate model (ECHAM5/MPI-OM1 GCM) ensemble. The dependence of the seriality on cyclone intensity is analyzed. Confirming previous studies, serial clustering is identified in reanalysis data sets primarily on both flanks and downstream regions of the North Atlantic storm track. This pattern is a robust feature in the reanalysis data sets. For the whole area, extreme cyclones cluster more than nonextreme cyclones. The ECHAM5/MPI-OM1 GCM is generally able to reproduce the spatial patterns of clustering under recent climate conditions, but some biases are identified. Under future climate conditions (A1B scenario), the GCM ensemble indicates that serial clustering may decrease over the North Atlantic storm track area and parts of western Europe. This decrease is associated with an extension of the polar jet toward Europe, which implies a tendency to a more regular occurrence of cyclones over parts of the North Atlantic Basin poleward of 50°N and western Europe. An increase of clustering of cyclones is projected south of Newfoundland. The detected shifts imply a change in the risk of occurrence of cumulative events over Europe under future climate conditions

Nonparametric inference of quantile curves for nonstationary time series

The paper considers nonparametric specification tests of quantile curves for a general class of nonstationary processes. Using Bahadur representation and Gaussian approximation results for nonstationary time series, simultaneous confidence bands and integrated squared difference tests are proposed to test various parametric forms of the quantile curves with asymptotically correct type I error rates. A wild bootstrap procedure is implemented to alleviate the problem of slow convergence of the asymptotic results. In particular, our results can be used to test the trends of extremes of climate variables, an important problem in understanding climate change. Our methodology is applied to the analysis of the maximum speed of tropical cyclone winds. It was found that an inhomogeneous upward trend for cyclone wind speeds is pronounced at high quantile values. However, there is no trend in the mean lifetime-maximum wind speed. This example shows the effectiveness of the quantile regression technique.Comment: Published in at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/09-AOS769 the Annals of Statistics (http://www.imstat.org/aos/) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org

Process-Oriented Evaluation of Climate and Weather Forecasting Models

Realistic climate and weather prediction models are necessary to produce confidence in projections of future climate over many decades and predictions for days to seasons. These models must be physically justified and validated for multiple weather and climate processes. A key opportunity to accelerate model improvement is greater incorporation of process-oriented diagnostics (PODs) into standard packages that can be applied during the model development process, allowing the application of diagnostics to be repeatable across multiple model versions and used as a benchmark for model improvement. A POD characterizes a specific physical process or emergent behavior that is related to the ability to simulate an observed phenomenon. This paper describes the outcomes of activities by the Model Diagnostics Task Force (MDTF) under the NOAA Climate Program Office (CPO) Modeling, Analysis, Predictions and Projections (MAPP) program to promote development of PODs and their application to climate and weather prediction models. MDTF and modeling center perspectives on the need for expanded process-oriented diagnosis of models are presented. Multiple PODs developed by the MDTF are summarized, and an open-source software framework developed by the MDTF to aid application of PODs to centers’ model development is presented in the context of other relevant community activities. The paper closes by discussing paths forward for the MDTF effort and for community process-oriented diagnosis

Extratropical???Tropical Interaction Model Intercomparison Project (Etin-Mip): Protocol and Initial Results

This article introduces the Extratropical???Tropical Interaction Model Intercomparison Project (ETIN-MIP), where a set of fully coupled model experiments are designed to examine the sources of longstanding tropical precipitation biases in climate models. In particular, we reduce insolation over three targeted latitudinal bands of persistent model biases: the southern extratropics, the southern tropics, and the northern extratropics. To address the effect of regional energy bias corrections on the mean distribution of tropical precipitation, such as the double intertropical convergence zone problem, we evaluate the quasi-equilibrium response of the climate system corresponding to a 50-yr period after the 100 years of prescribed energy perturbation. Initial results show that, despite a large intermodel spread in each perturbation experiment due to differences in ocean heat uptake response and climate feedbacks across models, the southern tropics is most efficient at driving a meridional shift of tropical precipitation. In contrast, the extratropical energy perturbations are effectively damped by anomalous heat uptake over the subpolar oceans, thereby inducing a smaller meridional shift of tropical precipitation compared with the tropical energy perturbations. The ETIN-MIP experiments allow us to investigate the global implications of regional energy bias corrections, providing a route to guide the practice of model development, with implications for understanding dynamical responses to anthropogenic climate change and geoengineering

Vorticity and Vertical Motions Diagnosed from Satellite Deep-Layer Temperatures

Spatial fields of satellite-measured deep-layer temperatures are examined in the context of quasigeostrophic theory. It is found that midtropospheric geostrophic vorticity and quasigeostrophic vertical motions can be diagnosed from microwave temperature measurements of only two deep layers. The lower- ( 1000-400 hPa) and upper- (400-50 hPa) layer temperatures are estimated from limb-corrected TIROS-N Microwave Sounding Units (MSU) channel 2 and 3 data, spatial fields of which can be used to estimate the midtropospheric thermal wind and geostrophic vorticity fields. Together with Trenberth's simplification of the quasigeostrophic omega equation, these two quantities can be then used to estimate the geostrophic vorticity advection by the thermal wind, which is related to the quasigeostrophic vertical velocity in the midtroposphere. Critical to the technique is the observation that geostrophic vorticity fields calculated from the channel 3 temperature features are very similar to those calculated from traditional, 'bottom-up' integrated height fields from radiosonde data. This suggests a lack of cyclone-scale height features near the top of the channel 3 weighting function, making the channel 3 cyclone-scale 'thickness' features approximately the same as height features near the bottom of the weighting function. Thus, the MSU data provide observational validation of the LID (level of insignificant dynamics) assumption of Hirshberg and Fritsch

Interactions Between Tropical Cyclones and the Midlatitude Waveguide: Downstream Impacts and the Role of Convective Processes

Significant amplification to the waveguide can occur when a recurving tropical cyclone (TC) interacts with the midlatitude flow, leading to significant downstream impacts. To this point in time, TC-midlatitude waveguide interactions have been conceptualized as primarily being driven by large-scale processes, with convective-scale contributions having been parameterized or neglected. This three-part study diagnoses the impact TC-midlatitude waveguide interactions have on the intensity evolution of downstream TCs and the role convective-scale processes play in TC-midlatitude waveguide interactions. Recurving TCs in both the North Atlantic and western North Pacific basins frequently interact favorably with upstream troughs, where a favorable interaction entails the tightening of a pre-existing potential vorticity (PV) gradient on the eastern flank of the trough, leading to subsequent downstream flow amplification in the vicinity of a downstream TC. In the Atlantic, weakening downstream TCs are closer to the midlatitude waveguide on the southeastern edge of the amplified midlatitude ridge, whereas strengthening downstream TCs are further from the waveguide and equatorward of the amplified midlatitude ridge. Conversely, western North Pacific strengthening and weakening secondary TCs are primarily stratified by latitude, with weakening secondary TCs located poleward of their strengthening secondary TC counterparts. Convective-scale processes are shown to potentially play a role in determining the strength and downstream evolution of TC-midlatitude waveguide interactions. This importance of convective-scale processes on the large-scales is accomplished by way of an inverse energy cascade supported by the filamentation of intensely negative PV generated by deep, moist convection. These negative PV anomalies are generated by intense horizonal gradients of diabatic warming and exist primarily in the middle- to upper-troposphere. While preliminary sensitivity simulations suggest that convective-scale processes in particular regions of a TC-midlatitude waveguide interaction may not play a key role in determining the strength, and subsequent evolution of the interaction, that is not to say that convective-scale processes do not play a role at all. Additionally, the relative importance of convective-scale processes may depend on the particular TC-midlatitude waveguide interaction being studied