A new method for attributing climate variations over the Atlantic Hurricane Basin's main development region

Abstract

We propose a new approach to decompose observed climate variations over the Atlantic Hurricane Basin's main development region (MDR) into components attributable to radiative forcing changes and to internal oceanic variability. Our attribution suggests that the observed multidecadal anomalies of vertical shear (Uz) and a simple index of maximum potential intensity (SIMPI) for tropical cyclones are both dominated by internal variability, consistent with multidecadal variations of Atlantic Hurricane activity; changes in radiative forcing led to increasing Uz and decreasing SIMPI since the late 50's, unfavorable for Atlantic Hurricane activity. Physically, at least for the GFDL model, sea surface temperature (SST) anomalies induced by ocean heat transport variations are more efficient in producing negative Uz anomalies than that induced by altered radiative forcing.