Variability of North Atlantic hurricanes

Tropical cyclones are affected by a large number of climatic factors, which translates into complex patterns of occurrence. The variability of annual metrics of tropical-cyclone activity has been intensively studied, in particular since the sudden activation of the North Atlantic in the mid 1990...

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Autores: Corral, Álvaro|||0000-0002-5280-2692, Turiel Martínez, Antonio M.
Tipo de recurso: artículo
Fecha de publicación:2011
País:España
Institución:Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona
Repositorio:Dipòsit Digital de Documents de la UAB
Idioma:inglés
OAI Identifier:oai:ddd.uab.cat:181518
Acceso en línea:https://ddd.uab.cat/record/181518
Access Level:acceso abierto
Palabra clave:Atmosfera
Metereologia
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spelling Variability of North Atlantic hurricanesseasonal versus individual-event featuresCorral, Álvaro|||0000-0002-5280-2692Turiel Martínez, Antonio M.AtmosferaMetereologiaTropical cyclones are affected by a large number of climatic factors, which translates into complex patterns of occurrence. The variability of annual metrics of tropical-cyclone activity has been intensively studied, in particular since the sudden activation of the North Atlantic in the mid 1990's. We provide first a swift overview on previous work by diverse authors about these annual metrics for the North-Atlantic basin, where the natural variability of the phenomenon, the existence of trends, the drawbacks of the records, and the influence of global warming have been the subject of interesting debates. Next, we present an alternative approach that does not focus on seasonal features but on the characteristics of single events [Corral et al., Nature Phys. 6, 693 (2010)]. It is argued that the individual-storm power dissipation index (PDI) constitutes a natural way to describe each event, and further, that the PDI statistics yields a robust law for the occurrence of tropical cyclones in terms of a power law. In this context, methods of fitting these distributions are discussed. As an important extension to this work we introduce a distribution function that models the whole range of the PDI density (excluding incompleteness effects at the smallest values), the gamma distribution, consisting in a powerlaw with an exponential decay at the tail. The characteristic scale of this decay, represented by the cutoff parameter, provides very valuable information on the finiteness size of the basin, via the largest values of the PDIs that the basin can sustain. We use the gamma fit to evaluate the influence of sea surface temperature (SST) on the occurrence of extreme PDI values, for which we find an increase around 50 % in the values of these basin-wide events for a 0.49 C SST average difference. Similar findings are observed for the effects of the positive phase of the Atlantic multidecadal oscillation and the number of hurricanes in a season on the PDI distribution. In the case of the El Niño Southern oscillation (ENSO), positive and negative values of the multivariate ENSO index do not have a significant effect on the PDI distribution; however, when only extreme values of the index are used, it is found that the presence of El Niño decreases the PDI of the most extreme hurricanes.Centre de Recerca MatemàticaCentre de Recerca Matemàtica 22011-01-0120112011-01-01Articlehttp://purl.org/coar/resource_type/c_6501AOhttp://purl.org/coar/version/c_b1a7d7d4d402bcceinfo:eu-repo/semantics/articleapplication/pdfhttps://ddd.uab.cat/record/181518reponame:Dipòsit Digital de Documents de la UABinstname:Universitat Autònoma de BarcelonaInglésengopen accesshttp://purl.org/coar/access_right/c_abf2Aquest document està subjecte a una llicència d'ús Creative Commons. Es permet la reproducció total o parcial, la distribució, i la comunicació pública de l'obra, sempre que no sigui amb finalitats comercials, i sempre que es reconegui l'autoria de l'obra original. No es permet la creació d'obres derivades.https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccessoai:ddd.uab.cat:1815182026-06-06T12:50:31Z
dc.title.none.fl_str_mv Variability of North Atlantic hurricanes
seasonal versus individual-event features
title Variability of North Atlantic hurricanes
spellingShingle Variability of North Atlantic hurricanes
Corral, Álvaro|||0000-0002-5280-2692
Atmosfera
Metereologia
title_short Variability of North Atlantic hurricanes
title_full Variability of North Atlantic hurricanes
title_fullStr Variability of North Atlantic hurricanes
title_full_unstemmed Variability of North Atlantic hurricanes
title_sort Variability of North Atlantic hurricanes
dc.creator.none.fl_str_mv Corral, Álvaro|||0000-0002-5280-2692
Turiel Martínez, Antonio M.
author Corral, Álvaro|||0000-0002-5280-2692
author_facet Corral, Álvaro|||0000-0002-5280-2692
Turiel Martínez, Antonio M.
author_role author
author2 Turiel Martínez, Antonio M.
author2_role author
dc.contributor.none.fl_str_mv Centre de Recerca Matemàtica
dc.subject.none.fl_str_mv Atmosfera
Metereologia
topic Atmosfera
Metereologia
description Tropical cyclones are affected by a large number of climatic factors, which translates into complex patterns of occurrence. The variability of annual metrics of tropical-cyclone activity has been intensively studied, in particular since the sudden activation of the North Atlantic in the mid 1990's. We provide first a swift overview on previous work by diverse authors about these annual metrics for the North-Atlantic basin, where the natural variability of the phenomenon, the existence of trends, the drawbacks of the records, and the influence of global warming have been the subject of interesting debates. Next, we present an alternative approach that does not focus on seasonal features but on the characteristics of single events [Corral et al., Nature Phys. 6, 693 (2010)]. It is argued that the individual-storm power dissipation index (PDI) constitutes a natural way to describe each event, and further, that the PDI statistics yields a robust law for the occurrence of tropical cyclones in terms of a power law. In this context, methods of fitting these distributions are discussed. As an important extension to this work we introduce a distribution function that models the whole range of the PDI density (excluding incompleteness effects at the smallest values), the gamma distribution, consisting in a powerlaw with an exponential decay at the tail. The characteristic scale of this decay, represented by the cutoff parameter, provides very valuable information on the finiteness size of the basin, via the largest values of the PDIs that the basin can sustain. We use the gamma fit to evaluate the influence of sea surface temperature (SST) on the occurrence of extreme PDI values, for which we find an increase around 50 % in the values of these basin-wide events for a 0.49 C SST average difference. Similar findings are observed for the effects of the positive phase of the Atlantic multidecadal oscillation and the number of hurricanes in a season on the PDI distribution. In the case of the El Niño Southern oscillation (ENSO), positive and negative values of the multivariate ENSO index do not have a significant effect on the PDI distribution; however, when only extreme values of the index are used, it is found that the presence of El Niño decreases the PDI of the most extreme hurricanes.
publishDate 2011
dc.date.none.fl_str_mv 2
2011-01-01
2011
2011-01-01
dc.type.none.fl_str_mv Article
http://purl.org/coar/resource_type/c_6501
AO
http://purl.org/coar/version/c_b1a7d7d4d402bcce
dc.type.openaire.fl_str_mv info:eu-repo/semantics/article
format article
dc.identifier.none.fl_str_mv https://ddd.uab.cat/record/181518
url https://ddd.uab.cat/record/181518
dc.language.none.fl_str_mv Inglés
eng
language_invalid_str_mv Inglés
language eng
dc.rights.none.fl_str_mv open access
http://purl.org/coar/access_right/c_abf2
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/
dc.rights.openaire.fl_str_mv info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess
rights_invalid_str_mv open access
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https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/
eu_rights_str_mv openAccess
dc.format.none.fl_str_mv application/pdf
dc.publisher.none.fl_str_mv Centre de Recerca Matemàtica
publisher.none.fl_str_mv Centre de Recerca Matemàtica
dc.source.none.fl_str_mv reponame:Dipòsit Digital de Documents de la UAB
instname:Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona
instname_str Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona
reponame_str Dipòsit Digital de Documents de la UAB
collection Dipòsit Digital de Documents de la UAB
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