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Near-Time Sea Surface Temperature and Tropical Cyclone Intensity in the Eastern North Pacific Basin

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Hurricanes and Climate Change

Abstract

Although a significant relationship between near-time sea surface temperature (SST) and tropical cyclone (TC) intensity has been found for many major TC basins, this topic has not been explored in the eastern North Pacific (ENP) basin. When the main development region of the (ENP) Ocean is subdivided into eastern (EDR) and western (WDR) development regions, SSTs show a weak, yet significant, positive relationship with intensities of the six-hourly TC observations and storms’ maximum strengths only in the WDR. This SST-storm intensity relationship is most apparent for the maximum lifetime TC intensity of WDR major hurricanes. The maximum strength of major hurricanes in the ENP basin is more clearly established in the WDR where SST is at least 25 °C, well below the minimum SST value that is observed in the North Atlantic basin.

When intensity observations are binned into SST intervals, the upper bound value of TC intensity is found to increase with SST. Compared to the previous TC climatological analysis (Whitney and Hobgood (1997) J Clim 10(11):2921–2930), the maximum relative wind speed has increased for SST bins of 27 °C (>26.5 °C and <27.5 °C) or higher. While a linear function was determined previously as the best empirical fit for the ENP maximum potential intensity (ENPMPI) for each SST bin (Whitney and Hobgood (1997) J Clim 10(11):2921–2930), other means of curve fitting such as the exponential decay (increase form) function also show skill at representing the SST-dependent ENPMPI in the WDR. When storm observations are regionally stratified, the rate of increasing maximum potential intensity with SST flattens out towards the highest SST category. Under the ambient condition in which the theoretical MPI is assumed along ENP storm tracks, the updated relationship of the outflow temperature with SST resembles an inverse (negative) sigmoid curve.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    NOAA High-Resolution SST data provided by the NOAA/OAR/ESRL PSD, Boulder, Colorado, USA, from their Web site at http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/psd/.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Physical and Environmental Sciences, University of Toronto Scarborough, 1265 Military Trail, Scarborough, Ontario, M1C 1A4, Canada

    Jerry Y. Jien, William A. Gough, Vincent Cheng & George Arhonditsis

  2. Department of Computer and Mathematical Sciences, University of Toronto Scarborough, 1265 Military Trail, Scarborough, Ontario, M1C 1A4, Canada

    Ken Butler

Authors
  1. Jerry Y. Jien
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  2. William A. Gough
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  3. Ken Butler
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  4. Vincent Cheng
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  5. George Arhonditsis
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Correspondence to Jerry Y. Jien .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. School of Geosciences, University of South Florida, Tampa, Florida, USA

    Jennifer M. Collins

  2. School of Earth Sciences, The University of Melbourne, Parkville, Victoria, Australia

    Kevin Walsh

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Jien, J.Y., Gough, W.A., Butler, K., Cheng, V., Arhonditsis, G. (2017). Near-Time Sea Surface Temperature and Tropical Cyclone Intensity in the Eastern North Pacific Basin. In: Collins, J., Walsh, K. (eds) Hurricanes and Climate Change. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-47594-3_3

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