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Poleward expansion of tropical cyclone latitudes in warming climates

Nature Geoscience volume 15, pages 14–28 (2022)Cite this article

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Abstract

Tropical cyclones (TCs, also known as hurricanes and typhoons) generally form at low latitudes with access to the warm waters of the tropical oceans, but far enough off the equator to allow planetary rotation to cause aggregating convection to spin up into coherent vortices. Yet, current prognostic frameworks for TC latitudes make contradictory predictions for climate change. Simulations of past warm climates, such as the Eocene and Pliocene, show that TCs can form and intensify at higher latitudes than of those during pre-industrial conditions. Observations and model projections for the twenty-first century indicate that TCs may again migrate poleward in response to anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions, which poses profound risks to the planet’s most populous regions. Previous studies largely neglected the complex processes that occur at temporal and spatial scales of individual storms as these are poorly resolved in numerical models. Here we review this mesoscale physics in the context of responses to climate warming of the Hadley circulation, jet streams and Intertropical Convergence Zone. We conclude that twenty-first century TCs will most probably occupy a broader range of latitudes than those of the past 3 million years as low-latitude genesis will be supplemented with increasing mid-latitude TC favourability, although precise estimates for future migration remain beyond current methodologies.

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Fig. 1: Tropical cyclogenesis in weather and climate.
Fig. 2: Planetary-scale atmospheric circulation, precipitation and TC activity.
Fig. 3: Changes in TC latitudinal distribution over geological timescales.
Fig. 4: Recent linear trends in key thermodynamic variables that affect TCs and their genesis potential.
Fig. 5: Large-scale circulations and TC latitudinal distributions under idealized climate warming scenarios in cloud-system-resolved aquaplanet simulations.
Fig. 6: Changes in the Northern Hemisphere ITCZ under different warming scenarios in CMIP6.

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Data availability

All the data used in this study is freely and publicly available in perpetuity. The TC data for the contemporary period (Fig. 2 and Extended Data Fig. 4) are plotted directly from IBTrACS157. These data are freely available at https://doi.org/10.25921/82ty-9e16. Version v04r00 was downloaded and the World Meteorological Organisation’s homogenization was used. Contemporary environment fields, used in Figs. 2 and 4 and in Extended Data Figs. 4, 6 and 8, were taken from ECMWF’s ERA5 reanalysis product156. All the data were downloaded at the native horizonal resolution (0.25 × 0.25°) as monthly means for the years 1979 to 2020. These raw data are freely and publicly available for download at https://doi.org/10.24381/cds.6860a573. The idealized cloud-resolving modelling data is replotted from Fedorov et al.32. These data are freely available in the Dryad repository https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.8pk0p2np2. The PETM modelling data (from Kiehl et al.34) are available at https://doi.org/10.1016/j.palaeo.2021.110421. CMIP6 data for the ITCZ plotted in Fig. 6 and Extended Data Fig. 7 were taken from 17 model centres that contributed to CMIP6. These data are available from the Earth System Grid Federation. Our CMIP6 analysis relies on subsets of the total model ensemble (+50 models). We used data from the following models: ACCESS-CM2158, ACCESS-ESM1-5159, BCC-CSM2-MR160, CAMS-CSM1-0161, CESM2-WACCM162, CIESM163, CanESM5164, EC-Earth3-Veg165, GFDL-CM4166, GFDL-ESM4167, INM-CM4-8168, INM-CM5-0169, IPSL-CM6A-LR170, MIROC6171, MPI-ESM1-2-HR172, MRI-ESM2-0173 and NorESM2-LM174.

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Acknowledgements

We thank M. Byrne (at the Universities of St Andrews and Oxford) and G. Vecchi (at Princeton University) for helpful discussions. We thank C. Zarzycki (at Penn State University) for providing the PETM data and N. Henderson (at Columbia University) for assistance with CMIP6 data access. We recognize and thank NASA, NOAA, ECMWF and the CMIP6 group of the World Climate Research Programme for making their data publicly and freely available. J.S. and A.F. were supported in part by grants from NASA (80NSSC21K0558), NOAA (NA20OAR4310377) and the ARCHANGE project of the ‘Make our planet great again’ programme (ANR-18-MPGA-0001, the Government of the French Republic). S.G. benefited from the Russian Science Foundation grant no. 20-17-00139 and from the Agreement no. 14.W0331.0006 with the Russian Ministry of Science and Higher Education. K.E. is supported by the US National Science Foundation (ICER-1854929). K.H. acknowledges funding from the UK Natural Environment Research Council.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Yale University, New Haven, CT, USA

    Joshua Studholme & Alexey V. Fedorov

  2. LOCEAN/IPSL, Sorbonne University, Paris, France

    Alexey V. Fedorov

  3. Shirshov Institute of Oceanology, Moscow, Russia

    Sergey K. Gulev

  4. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA

    Kerry Emanuel

  5. University of Reading, Reading, UK

    Kevin Hodges

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J.S. conceived the study, wrote the drafts, produced the figures and led the preparation of the manuscript with input from all the co-authors.

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Extended data

Extended Data Fig. 1 The development and intensification of Hurricane Goni (2020, peak intensity 87 m s–1).

Poorly organised convection over the west Pacific warm pool aggregates over the course of three days between October 22th and 24th (a b c), and then acquires coherent rotation over the subsequent three days (25th to 27th, d e f) while propagating westward away from its seeding region. Between Oct 28th and 30th, Goni developed into a fully-fledged TC (g h i) and made the strongest recorded landfall event when reaching the Philippines on Oct 31st. Data from ref. 154.

Extended Data Fig. 2 The extratropical transition of Hurricane Paulette and the simultaneous tropical transition of Subtropical Storm Alpha.

Hurricane Paulette, which originally developed out of an easterly wave on Sept 7th, reached its peak intensity on Sept 14th (47 m s-1) and then underwent extratropical transition to become an extratropical cyclone on Sept 17th. It then moved south and underwent tropical transition to intensify as a tropical cyclone on Sept 22. Subtropical Storm Alpha (peak intensity 22 m s-1) was the first ever tropical cyclone to make landfall in Portugal and the eastern-most genesis event in the North Atlantic record. At the same time as these events, a rare medicane developed, named Cyclone Ianos (peak intensity 34 m s-1), which made landfall in Greece, seen in Extended Data Fig. 3. Data from ref. 154.

Extended Data Fig. 3 The North Atlantic on September 16th, 2020.

Hurricane Sally (peak intensity 47 m s-1) can be seen making landfall over Alabama in the US, while Hurricane Teddy (peak intensity 63 m s-1) was intensifying over the tropical North Atlantic and to its northeast, Tropical Storm Vicky is being weakened by strong environmental wind shear. Hurricane Paulette can be seen midway through its extratropical transition of the coast of Nova Scotia and the extratropical cutoff low that became Subtropical Storm Alpha can be seen off the coast of Portugal. In the Mediterranean, the rare Medicane Ianos can be seen south of Italy. Tropical Storms Wilfred and Beta later developed out of the organising convection visible off equatorial Africa and in the Gulf of Mexico respectively. Data from ref. 154.

Extended Data Fig. 4 Planetary-scale atmospheric circulation, precipitation, and TC activity during the simulated Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM) and the modern period.

a, c First tracked positions and b, d TC tracks for PETM and modern climates. The green overlay in b and d show the 6.5 mm/day climatological TC season precipitation contours. PETM data is replotted from simulations in ref. 34 and modern data is from IBTrACs (methods). Red and blue dots are as in Fig. 2, blue for 1980-1999 and red for 2000-2019. Note that the lysis definition marking the end of the tracks between the PETM tracking and modern data are not easily reconcilable. The suppression of the low latitude TCs in the PETM is related to the splitting of the summertime subtropical and eddy-driven jets (Extended Data Fig. 5 and Fig. 5).

Extended Data Fig. 5 Zonal-mean large-scale climate and north-south TC lifetime maximum intensity during the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM, CO2 1590 ppm).

Replotted from the ~0.25-degree resolution atmospheric GCM simulations of ref. 34. Note the strong agreement on coincident jet split and TC activity in the midlatitude with the idealized cloud-system-resolving aquaplanet simulations of ref. 32 shown in Fig. 5 of the main manuscript.

Extended Data Fig. 6 Surface precipitation, tropospheric winds and recent linear trends from ERA5.

a, c, e The 1980-2019 precipitation, and upper (300 hPa) and lower level (850 hPa) wind climatology for the tropical cyclone season (July through September for the northern hemisphere, January through March for the southern hemisphere). b, d, f The linear trends in these climatologies over the same period. Only trends for which p values are < 0.05 are plotted. The contour lines in b, d, and f are used to visualise the ITCZ (6.5 mm day-1), and the jet stream locations (5 m s-1 in the lower troposphere in d and 20 m s-1 in the upper troposphere in f). Data from ERA5156.

Extended Data Fig. 7 As in Fig. 6 but for the Southern Hemisphere during TC season there: January-February-March.

Note the wide range in projections for the atmosphere only (‘amip’) simulations in blue, highlighting the important role of atmosphere-ocean coupling in tropical climate. The largest contribution to this ‘southern ITCZ’ comes from the South Pacific Convergence Zone (SPCZ). Also note that these results may be affected by the models’ double-ITCZ problem, which exaggerates the magnitude of the tropical convection to the south of the equator. Data from refs. 158,159,160,161,162,163,164,165,166,167,168,169,170,171,172,173,174.

Extended Data Fig. 8 Surface enthalpy fluxes and recent linear trends from ERA5 (1980-2019).

Plotted as in Extended Data Fig. 6. Climatology and trends are for the tropical cyclone season (July through September for the northern hemisphere, January through March for the southern hemisphere). Data from ERA5156.

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Studholme, J., Fedorov, A.V., Gulev, S.K. et al. Poleward expansion of tropical cyclone latitudes in warming climates. Nat. Geosci. 15, 14–28 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41561-021-00859-1

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