Collaborative Research: Tropical Cyclone Variability in the Western North Pacific Over the Common Era

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The Western North Pacific is the most active tropical cyclone basin in the world, with an average of 40 storms per year impacting coastlines, such as those in China, Philippines, and Oceania. As the Earth's climate continues to warm, understanding the climatic driving mechanisms responsible for modulating storm activity, including where and how often tropical cyclones are generated, is of paramount importance. The only way to capture long-term patterns of tropical cyclone variability is by creating proxy reconstructions from the geological record. To examine the link between climatic drivers and tropical cyclone modulation, Dr. Jessica Pilarczyk (Simon Fraser University) and Dr. Davin Wallace (University of Southern Mississippi) will exploit geologic records of intense tropical cyclone passage across a geographic array of sites in the Western North Pacific. Using a combination of field (61-day research cruise to remote coastal sites), laboratory (microfossil, X-ray Fluorescence, sedimentology), and modelling techniques, the climatic drivers responsible for changes in tropical cyclone activity, including variations in the Pacific warm pool, attendant shifts in the position of the intertropical convergence zone, and El Nino Southern Oscillation-like variability, will be investigated. Unravelling the climatic forces that drive tropical cyclone variability in the Pacific Ocean will offer broader insight into global patterns of tropical frequency, intensity, track, and area of development, and will shed light on storm patterns in other basins, such as Hurricane Fiona, which hit Atlantic Canada in September 2022 and resulted a state of emergency and $605M in damages.