Picture: Hurricane makes landfall. Credit: David Mark (Pixabay)
As climate models are the best tool to understand the relationship between the climate and tropical cyclone formation, the tropical cyclone research world is moving toward high‐resolution climate models with improved parameterization schemes to better understand their formation characteristics in the current climate and to improve confidence in future projections.
In this study, a high‐resolution atmospheric climate model is used to observe the performance of two different tracking schemes when compared with observations in simulating different tropical cyclone characteristics including:
- geographical distributions,
- mean annual numbers,
- the influence of El Niño (La Niña), and
- interannual and seasonal variability of cyclone frequency.
Of the two schemes employed, one is the traditional CSIRO tracking scheme that detects tropical cyclone‐like vortices and the other scheme uses the Okubo‐Weiss zeta parameter, a phenomena based scheme, to detect the circulations that have the potential for tropical formation.
The Okubo‐Weiss zeta parameter scheme has superior performance in detecting tropical cyclone frequency characteristics compared to the CSIRO scheme.
- Paper: Raavi, P. H., & Walsh, K. J. E. ( 2020). Sensitivity of tropical cyclone formation to resolution‐dependent and independent tracking schemes in high‐resolution climate model simulations. Earth and Space Science, 7, e2019EA000906. https://doi.org/10.1029/2019EA000906.