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Climate change and tropical cyclone trend

[...]we question the robustness of his conclusions1 for the following reasons: (1) TCSs generally increase with the latitude of the tropical cyclones and are therefore very sensitive to the bias of tropical-cyclone detection with respect to latitude; and (2) in the pre-satellite era (1949-1965), the...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Nature (London) 2019-06, Vol.570 (7759), p.E3-E5
Main Authors: Moon, Il-Ju, Kim, Sung-Hun, Chan, Johnny C. L.
Format: Article
Language:English
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Summary:[...]we question the robustness of his conclusions1 for the following reasons: (1) TCSs generally increase with the latitude of the tropical cyclones and are therefore very sensitive to the bias of tropical-cyclone detection with respect to latitude; and (2) in the pre-satellite era (1949-1965), there is a high possibility that systematic biases in the detection of tropical cyclones exist in the besttrack data, which could produce spurious trends in TCS. [...]the slowdown of TCS stated1 may not be a real climate signal or it may be exaggerated. [...]in the western North Pacific (WNP) that accounts for 30% of the total annual global tropical-cyclone frequency, the annual number of position points for storms with speeds below 35 knots is on average 157 during the pre-satellite era (P1), but significantly increased to 360 during the geostationary-satellite era (P3), a 129% increase (Table 1). [...]we conclude that for the analysis of tropical-cyclone trends and climate research, care must be taken when using any inhomogeneous tropical-cyclone data in the pre-satellite era, including position-based information such as TCS and the location of lifetime maximum intensity11 as well as intensity and frequency. Kossin, J. P., Olander, T. L. & Knapp, K. R. Trend analysis with a new global record of tropical cyclone intensity.
ISSN:0028-0836
1476-4687
DOI:10.1038/s41586-019-1222-3