In #1-#6 of the “Extreme Weather” series we looked at trends in Tropical Cyclones (TCs) from the perspective of chapter 11 of the 6th assessment report of the IPCC (AR6). The six parts were summarized here.
The report breaks up each type of extreme weather, reviews recent trends and then covers attribution and future projections.
Both attribution and future projections rely primarily on climate models. We looked at some of the ideas of attribution in the “Natural Variability, Attribution and Climate Models” series.
AR6 has a section: Model Evaluation, on p. 1587, before it moves into Detection and Attribution, Event Attribution.
How good are models at reproducing Tropical Cyclones?
Accurate projections of future TC activity have two principal requirements: accurate representation of changes in the relevant environmental factors (e.g., sea surface temperatures) that can affect TC activity, and accurate representation of actual TC activity in given environmental conditions.
Suppose in the future we had a model that was amazing at reproducing tropical cyclones when a variety of climate metrics were accurately reproduced. However, if the climate model didn’t reproduce these metrics reliably we still wouldn’t get a reliable answer about future trends in tropical cyclones.
As a result tropical cyclones are a major modeling challenge.
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