The use of global climate models for tropical cyclone risk assessment

Abstract

As tropical cyclones (TCs) make landfall in increasingly populated regions, the costs rise and are likely to continue rising in the future. The likely scenario of the TCs themselves changing in the future together with rising seas due to climate change will compound the problem. TC risk assessment needs to undergo a step change for society to properly confront this new era of TC risk. Next-generation global climate models (GCMs) are poised to bring about this change, and this chapter explores the potential role of GCMs in TC risk assessment. Long-term global climate model simulations are beginning to capture key TC characteristics that cause damage, thereby bringing a wealth of new risk-related information that presents a potentially powerful transformation of TC risk assessment. These physically based datasets will support better understanding of TC activity on longer timescales, exploration of events outside the range of the historical record, quantification of clustering, and discovery of teleconnected risks across TC basins. The integration of GCMs with risk assessment is a rapidly developing field, yet still in an exploratory phase, and a number of barriers need to be overcome including treatment of model error and understanding how to effectively integrate GCM information with risk assessment.