Journal article
Dynamically downscaled simulations of Australian region tropical cyclones in current and future climates
SL Lavender, KJE Walsh
GEOPHYSICAL RESEARCH LETTERS | AMER GEOPHYSICAL UNION | Published : 2011
DOI: 10.1029/2011GL047499
Abstract
A fine resolution atmospheric model is used to analyse changes in the climatology of tropical cyclones over the Australian region under future climate conditions. This model gives a good simulation of the observed climatological intensity distribution, which has been difficult to obtain in many previous studies. Projected changes for the end of the 21st century show a decrease of approximately 30% in numbers of tropical cyclones. There is an associated poleward shift in the regions of both genesis and dissipation of tropical cyclones. The dynamical mechanisms for this change are found to be changes in the vertical velocity and relative vorticity, which may be linked with anticipated future c..
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Funding Acknowledgements
We acknowledge the modelling groups, the Program for Climate Model Diagnosis and Intercomparison (PCMDI) and the WCRP's Working Group on Coupled Modelling (WGCM) for their roles in making available the WCRP CMIP3 multi-model dataset. Support of this dataset is provided by the Office of Science, U.S. Department of Energy. We would also like to thank CSIRO and Geoscience Australia for their generous assistance with this project, particularly Marcus Thatcher and Jack Katzfey who provided some of the 60 km simulations. Thanks also to Debbie Abbs and Tom Beer as well as two anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments on this paper. Funding for this work was provided by the CSIRO Climate Adaptation Flagship.