TY - JOUR
T1 - Potential Increase in Hazard From Mediterranean Hurricane Activity With Global Warming
AU - González-Alemán, Juan J.
AU - Pascale, Salvatore
AU - Gutierrez-Fernandez, Jesús
AU - Murakami, Hiroyuki
AU - Gaertner, Miguel A.
AU - Vecchi, Gabriel Andres
N1 - Funding Information:
The authors thank two anonymous reviewers for improving the manuscript. This work has been funded through PhD grant BES‐2014‐067905 by the Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities, and cofunded by the European Social Fund. This work has also been funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities, the Spanish State Research Agency, and the European Regional Development Fund, through grant CGL2017‐89583‐R. Work conducted by UCLM coauthors has been also supported by a project that has received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation programme under grant agreement 776661, entitled DownScaling CLImate ImPACTs and decarbonisation pathways in EU islands, and enhancing socioeconomic and non‐market evaluation of Climate Change for Europe, for 2050 and Beyond. The opinions expressed are those of the author(s) only and should not be considered as representative of the European Commission's official position. S. P. was supported by the NOAA CICS grant NA14OAR4320106. G. A. V. was supported in part by NSF EAR‐1520683 and the Cooperative Institute for Modeling the Earth System at Princeton University. We also thank Mike Sheppard for providing the allfit- dist function in MATLAB software package. The authors thank S. B. Kapnick and T. Knutson for comments on the manuscript. Data and code to produce results obtained in this work are publicly available at the following link: https://mfr.osf.io/render?url= https%3A%2F%2Fosf.io%2Ffcv64% 2Fdownload.
Publisher Copyright:
©2019. American Geophysical Union. All Rights Reserved.
PY - 2019/2/16
Y1 - 2019/2/16
N2 - Mediterranean hurricanes (Medicanes) are intense cyclones that acquire tropical characteristics, associated with extreme winds and rainfall, thus posing a serious natural hazard to populated areas along Mediterranean coasts. Understanding how Medicanes will change with global warming remains, however, a challenge, because coarse resolution and/or the lack of atmosphere-ocean coupling limit the reliability of numerical simulations. Here we investigate the Medicanes' response to global warming using a recently developed 25-km global coupled climate model, which features a realistic representation of Medicanes in present climate conditions. It is found that despite a decrease in frequency, Medicanes potentially become more hazardous in the late century, lasting longer and producing stronger winds and rainfall. These changes are associated with a more robust hurricane-like structure and are mainly confined to autumn. Thus, continued anthropogenic warming will increase the risks associated with Medicanes even in an intermediate scenario (Representative Concentration Pathway, RCP4.5), with potential natural and socioeconomic consequences.
AB - Mediterranean hurricanes (Medicanes) are intense cyclones that acquire tropical characteristics, associated with extreme winds and rainfall, thus posing a serious natural hazard to populated areas along Mediterranean coasts. Understanding how Medicanes will change with global warming remains, however, a challenge, because coarse resolution and/or the lack of atmosphere-ocean coupling limit the reliability of numerical simulations. Here we investigate the Medicanes' response to global warming using a recently developed 25-km global coupled climate model, which features a realistic representation of Medicanes in present climate conditions. It is found that despite a decrease in frequency, Medicanes potentially become more hazardous in the late century, lasting longer and producing stronger winds and rainfall. These changes are associated with a more robust hurricane-like structure and are mainly confined to autumn. Thus, continued anthropogenic warming will increase the risks associated with Medicanes even in an intermediate scenario (Representative Concentration Pathway, RCP4.5), with potential natural and socioeconomic consequences.
KW - Medicanes
KW - climate change
KW - convection
KW - cutoff lows
KW - global climate models
KW - tropical cyclones
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U2 - 10.1029/2018GL081253
DO - 10.1029/2018GL081253
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85060922725
SN - 0094-8276
VL - 46
SP - 1754
EP - 1764
JO - Geophysical Research Letters
JF - Geophysical Research Letters
IS - 3
ER -