The increasing intensity of the strongest tropical cyclones
The increasing intensity of the strongest tropical cyclones
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DOI：
10.1038/nature07234
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发表时间：
2008-09-04
期刊：
影响因子：
64.8
通讯作者：
Jagger, Thomas H.
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Elsner, James B.;Kossin, James P.;Jagger, Thomas H.
大西洋热带气旋的平均强度正在增强，其30年的趋势与大西洋和其他地区的海洋温度上升有关(1-4)。然而，在热带其他地区，热带气旋强度的可能趋势不那么明显，这是因为观测记录不可靠和不完整，而且在以前的趋势分析中，对平均强度的变化的关注有限。在这里，我们通过检查每个气旋最大风速(即气旋在其一生中达到的最大强度)的上分位数的趋势来克服这两个限制，这些趋势是根据来自卫星记录档案的同类数据估计的。我们发现风速分位数在第70百分位数以上有显著的上升趋势，趋势高达0.3+/-0.09m S(-1)yr(-1)(S.E.)最强的龙卷风。我们注意到每个大洋流域最强热带气旋的估计寿命--最大风速(第99个百分位数)有单独的上升趋势，在这个分位数上增长最大的出现在北大西洋，尽管并不是所有的盆地在统计上都有显著的增长。我们的结果与假设是定性一致的，即随着海洋变暖，海洋有更多的能量转化为热带气旋风。
Atlantic tropical cyclones are getting stronger on average, with a 30- year trend that has been related to an increase in ocean temperatures over the Atlantic Ocean and elsewhere(1-4). Over the rest of the tropics, however, possible trends in tropical cyclone intensity are less obvious, owing to the unreliability and incompleteness of the observational record and to a restricted focus, in previous trend analyses, on changes in average intensity. Here we overcome these two limitations by examining trends in the upper quantiles of per- cyclone maximum wind speeds ( that is, the maximum intensities that cyclones achieve during their lifetimes), estimated from homogeneous data derived from an archive of satellite records. We find significant upward trends for wind speed quantiles above the 70th percentile, with trends as high as 0.3 +/- 0.09 m s(-1) yr(-1) (s.e.) for the strongest cyclones. We note separate upward trends in the estimated lifetime-maximum wind speeds of the very strongest tropical cyclones ( 99th percentile) over each ocean basin, with the largest increase at this quantile occurring over the North Atlantic, although not all basins show statistically significant increases. Our results are qualitatively consistent with the hypothesis that as the seas warm, the ocean has more energy to convert to tropical cyclone wind.