Authors: Steven J Lambert John C Fyfe
Publish Date: 2006/01/24
Volume: 26, Issue: 7-8, Pages: 713-728
Abstract
The effect of enhanced greenhouse warming on the behaviour of midlatitude cyclones is examined for changes in the total number of cyclone events and for changes in the number of intense events using the daily averaged mean sea level pressure simulated by coupled climate models participating in the IPCC AR4 Fourth Assessment Report diagnostic exercise Results are presented for a set of scenarios which were produced using a wide range of increasing levels of greenhouse gases For the enhanced greenhouse warming experiments the models simulated a reduction in the total number of events and an increase in the number of intense events This is a robust result which essentially all the models exhibit Comparison of the results for each of the scenarios shows that the magnitude of the changes in the number of simulated events increases with increasing levels greenhouse gas forcing used in the scenarios Even though the numbers of events change there is no apparent change seen in the geographical distribution of the events ie there is no obvious change in the positions of the storm tracks seen on hemispheric charts This was also evident in the results for the filtered variance of the meridional wind which was used as a proxy for cyclone activity In spite of this it is possible that small shifts in the storm tracks which are difficult to resolve with the relatively coarse grid used for analysis could occurWe acknowledge the international modelling groups for providing their data for analysis the Program for Climate Model Diagnosis and Intercomparison PCMDI for collecting and archiving the model data the JSC/CLIVAR Working Group on Coupled Modelling WGCM and their Coupled Model Intercomparison Project CMIP and Climate Simulation Panel for organizing the model data analysis activity and the IPCC WG1 TSU for technical support The IPCC Data Archive at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory is supported by the Office of Science US Department of Energy We thank the two referees for their efforts in reviewing the paper
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