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The response of land-falling tropical cyclone characteristics to projected climate change in northeast Australia

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Abstract

Land-falling tropical cyclones along the Queensland coastline can result in serious and widespread damage. However, the effects of climate change on cyclone characteristics such as intensity, trajectory, rainfall, and especially translation speed and size are not well-understood. This study explores the relative change in the characteristics of three case studies by comparing the simulated tropical cyclones under current climate conditions with simulations of the same systems under future climate conditions. Simulations are performed with the Weather Research and Forecasting Model and environmental conditions for the future climate are obtained from the Community Earth System Model using a pseudo global warming technique. Results demonstrate a consistent response of increasing intensity through reduced central pressure (by up to 11 hPa), increased wind speeds (by 5–10% on average), and increased rainfall (by up to 27% for average hourly rainfall rates). The responses of other characteristics were variable and governed by either the location and trajectory of the current climate cyclone or the change in the steering flow. The cyclone that traveled furthest poleward encountered a larger climate perturbation, resulting in a larger proportional increase in size, rainfall rate, and wind speeds. The projected monthly average change in the 500 mb winds with climate change governed the alteration in the both the trajectory and translation speed for each case. The simulated changes have serious implications for damage to coastal settlements, infrastructure, and ecosystems through increased wind speeds, storm surge, rainfall, and potentially increased size of some systems.

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Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank James Done, and Greg Holland at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) for very helpful discussion of the results; Noel Davidson at the Australian Bureau of Meteorology for the high-resolution ACCESS initialization data and advice; and Daniel P. Moriarty III at the NASA Goddard Spaceflight Center for assistance in editing the manuscript. The authors would also like to thank the anonymous reviewer for their helpful insights, suggestions, and contributions that were instrumental for improving this study and paper. Computational work was supported by NCAR and the Yellowstone supercomputing facilities. This work was funded by Brown University and in part by NCAR summer visitor program. NCAR is sponsored by the National Science Foundation.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Earth, Environmental, and Planetary Sciences, Brown University, Providence, RI, 02912, USA

    Chelsea L. Parker & Amanda H. Lynch

  2. Institute at Brown for Environment and Society, Brown University, Providence, RI, 02912, USA

    Chelsea L. Parker & Amanda H. Lynch

  3. National Center for Atmospheric Research, Boulder, CO, 80301, USA

    Cindy L. Bruyère & Priscilla A. Mooney

  4. Environmental Sciences and Management, North-West University, Potchefstroom, South Africa

    Cindy L. Bruyère

  5. Uni Research Climate, Bjerknes Centre for Climate Research, Bergen, Norway

    Priscilla A. Mooney

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  1. Chelsea L. Parker
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  2. Cindy L. Bruyère
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  3. Priscilla A. Mooney
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  4. Amanda H. Lynch
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Chelsea L. Parker.

Appendix A

Appendix A

1.1 Effect of future changes in relative humidity on tropical cyclone Ita

The pseudo-global warming (PGW) technique used in this study calculated the difference between the future and current climate of a GCM (ΔCC) and added this to the ERA-Interim reanalysis to create forcing data for the future climate. This ΔCC was applied to all variables in the forcing data, including the relative humidity (RH). There is some disagreement in the literature regarding whether the RH should be allowed to change in future simulations. Many PGW studies (e.g. Lynn et al. 2009; Rasmussen et al. 2011; Dai et al. 2017) have applied a delta to the RH, although there are examples where RH is not changed (e.g. Kawase et al. 2009). One argument is that an inconsistency is created when adding a broadly uniform, GCM-derived specific humidity delta onto a specific synoptic pattern. For example, if a relatively homogeneous specific humidity delta were applied to a synoptic cold front, there would be a larger RH increase on the cold side of the front (perhaps even resulting in supersaturation), whereas the RH could decrease in the warm air. A second argument is that RH is generally expected to remain constant in the future (Allen and Ingram 2002). However, this is contradicted by a recent study (Wang et al. 2017) that shows relative humidity will decrease over land as Earth warms which suggests that RH should be allowed to change in the PGW technique. This debate motivates the short study described in this Appendix.

The future climate simulations for Ita described in the main text were repeated without changing relative humidity i.e. ΔCCRH = 0, and the results are shown in Figs. 8, 9 and 10. Figure 8 shows that the tropical cyclone in the future climate simulation with no ΔCCRH moves more southward than the future climate simulation with a ΔCCRH. However, the general pattern is the same regardless of the ΔCCRH. The difference between the two future climate simulations is small compared to the difference between either of the future climate simulations and the current climate simulation.

In the first 72 h of the simulations, there is very little difference between the simulated intensity for Ita in both future climates (as indicated by the minimum sea level pressures shown Fig. 9). After the first 72 h, the differences are not directly caused by the changes in relative humidity, but due to the slight change in the trajectories. Previous studies (e.g. Hill and Lackmann 2009) found that environmental relative humidity exerts an influence on TC size. However, in this sensitivity study, the TC size (as indicated by the average radius of the 34-knot winds in Fig. 9) does not change substantially in the first 72 h. There is a discernable difference after this period, but again this can be attributed to the different trajectories for the two future climate simulations and is not directly due to the changes in relative humidity.

Figure 10 shows the ΔCCRH at 900 hPa in April that was used for the PGW technique for TC Ita. At 900 hPa, ΔCCRH is small (~ − 2 to 4%) and shows little variation spatially. Therefore, it unsurprising that ΔCCRH does not substantially effect the simulated characteristics of Ita. The results suggest that a constant RH assumption may be valid in maritime PGW studies. However, we conclude that the inclusion or exclusion of the ΔCCRH does not affect the overall results described in the main text of this study and has been included for consistency across variables.

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Parker, C.L., Bruyère, C.L., Mooney, P.A. et al. The response of land-falling tropical cyclone characteristics to projected climate change in northeast Australia. Clim Dyn 51, 3467–3485 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00382-018-4091-9

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