Articles

Autoregressive Modeling for Tropical Cyclone Intensity Climatology

Lee, Chia Ying; Tippett, Michael K.; Sobel, Adam H.; Camargo, Suzana J.

An autoregressive model is developed to simulate the climatological distribution of global tropical cyclone (TC) intensity. The model consists of two components: a regression-based deterministic component that advances the TC intensity in time and depends on the storm state and surrounding large-scale environment and a stochastic forcing. Potential intensity, deep-layer mean vertical shear, and midlevel relative humidity are the environmental variables included in the deterministic component. Given a storm track and its environment, the model is initialized and then iterated along the track. Model performance is evaluated by its ability to represent the observed global and basin distributions of TC intensity as well as lifetime maximum intensity (LMI). The deterministic model alone captures the spatial features of the climatological TC intensity distribution but with intensities that remain below 100 kt (1 kt ≈ 0.51 m s−1). Addition of white (uncorrelated in time) stochastic forcing reduces this bias by improving the simulated intensification rates and the frequency of major storms. The model simulates a realistic range of intensities, but the frequency of major storms remains too low in some basins.

Files

Also Published In

Title
Journal of Climate
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1175/JCLI-D-15-0909.1