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Landfalling hurricane track modes and decay

Nature volume 606, pages E7–E11 (2022)Cite this article

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A Publisher Correction to this article was published on 11 July 2022

Matters Arising to this article was published on 22 June 2022

The Original Article was published on 11 November 2020

This article has been updated

arising from L. Li and P. Chakraborty Nature https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-020-2867-7 (2020)

Li and Chakraborty1 (hereafter LC) recently reported a significant slowdown of the weakening of North Atlantic landfalling hurricanes during 1967–2018. They showed that the contemporaneous rise in the sea surface temperature (SST) is the primary cause that lengthens the decay time. Here we question their methodology and robustness such that the reported slower weakening over the past half-century may be exaggerated. In addition, we show that the decay highly depends on the landfalling track modes rather than the SST, with the effective area of moisture supply from the ocean playing a vital role.

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Fig. 1: Dependence of decay on land–sea mask and SST.
Fig. 2: Landfalling hurricane track modes and decay.

Data availability

The Atlantic HURDAT2 best-track data6 are available at https://www.nhc.noaa.gov/data/. The HadISST data3 are available at https://climatedataguide.ucar.edu/climate-data/sst-data-hadisst-v11. The ERA5 reanalysis4 is available at https://www.ecmwf.int/en/forecasts/datasets/reanalysis-datasets/era5. The post-processed data from LC are available at https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-020-2867-7. The data that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author on request.

Change history

References

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Acknowledgements

This study was supported by the National Key R&D Program of China (2019YFC1510400), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (41975052), the National Natural Science Foundation of China and Macau Science and Technology Development Joint Fund (41861164027), the Innovation Group Project of the Southern Marine Science and Engineering Guangdong Laboratory (Zhuhai) (311021001), the Guangdong Province Key Laboratory for Climate Change and Natural Disaster Studies (2020B1212060025), and the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities, Sun Yat-sen University (2021qntd29).

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Atmospheric Sciences, Sun Yat-sen University, and Southern Marine Science and Engineering Guangdong Laboratory (Zhuhai), Zhuhai, China

    Kelvin T. F. Chan, Kailin Zhang & Yue Wu

  2. Guangdong Province Key Laboratory for Climate Change and Natural Disaster Studies, Sun Yat-sen University, Zhuhai, China

    Kelvin T. F. Chan

  3. Key Laboratory of Tropical Atmosphere-Ocean System (Sun Yat-sen University), Ministry of Education, Zhuhai, China

    Kelvin T. F. Chan

  4. Guy Carpenter Asia-Pacific Climate Impact Centre, School of Energy and Environment, City University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China

    Johnny C. L. Chan

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  1. Kelvin T. F. Chan
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Contributions

K.T.F.C. conceived the idea, supervised the study and wrote the manuscript. K.T.F.C., K.Z. and Y.W. performed the analysis. All authors contributed to the discussion and editing of the manuscript.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Kelvin T. F. Chan.

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The authors declare no competing interests.

Additional information

Extended data

is available for this paper at https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-022-04791-1.

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Extended data figures and tables

Extended Data Fig. 1 Categorization of landfalling track modes.

Following LC, at least four continuous inland data points should exist. The intensity of the landfalling hurricane at the first data point is ≥ 33 m s−1. The threshold of translation velocity at 10 km h−1 and the criterial angle between the landfalling track and coastline at 45° have been practically validated that can physically distinguish the characteristics among different landfalling track modes.

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Chan, K.T.F., Zhang, K., Wu, Y. et al. Landfalling hurricane track modes and decay. Nature 606, E7–E11 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-022-04791-1

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