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Meteorology

Counting the coming storms

Nature Climate Change volume 2, pages 574–575 (2012)Cite this article

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Tropical Atlantic storms impact the lives of many thousands of people each year. A study describes how different future anthropogenic emission pathways may change the frequency of these storms.

The question of whether tropical Atlantic storms will increase or decrease in frequency and intensity during the coming decades has received considerable scientific attention, primarily because of the enormous physical, emotional and financial damage wreaked by such events. The financial damage of tropical storms has increased to around US$26 billion per year on average and this is projected to double by the end of the century, even without any climatic changes1. Those storms that make landfall over highly populated areas (such as Hurricane Katrina in 2005) cause far greater harm. Writing in Nature Climate Change, Villarini and Vecchi2 report that future emissions of greenhouse gases are unlikely to significantly change the number of tropical Atlantic storms. However, there are intriguing suggestions that different types of anthropogenic emission could affect the number of storms in subtly diverse ways.

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Figure 1: Two tropical Atlantic hurricanes in a high-resolution atmospheric simulation with the HadGEM3 global climate model11 at a resolution of N512 (25 km in mid-latitudes).

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Acknowledgements

P. L.V. is Willis Chair in Climate Systems Science and Climate Hazards, partly funded through the Willis Research Network, which is part of the Willis Group. The results of this work were not influenced by possible financial gains or losses by the Willis Group.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Meteorology, Ed Hawkins and Pier Luigi Vidale are at NCAS-Climate, University of Reading, Reading RG6 6BB, UK,

    Ed Hawkins & Pier Luigi Vidale

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  1. Ed Hawkins
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  2. Pier Luigi Vidale
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Correspondence to Ed Hawkins or Pier Luigi Vidale.

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Hawkins, E., Vidale, P. Counting the coming storms. Nature Clim Change 2, 574–575 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1038/nclimate1639

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