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
technique also detects a significant decrease in the intensification rate of hurricanes
near the coastal U.S. during the active phase compared to the quiescent phase.
Finally, the influence of the El Ni\~no Southern Oscillation on hurricane activity is
generally well captured as well, but the technique fails to reproduce the increase in
activity over the western part of the basin during Modoki El Niños.Ministerio de Economa y Competitividad (MINECO; Project
GL2014-55764-R