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Regional climate model projections of rainfall from U.S. landfalling tropical cyclones

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Abstract

The eastern United States is vulnerable to flooding from tropical cyclone rainfall. Understanding how both the frequency and intensity of this rainfall will change in the future climate is a major challenge. One promising approach is the dynamical downscaling of relatively coarse general circulation model results using higher-resolution regional climate models (RCMs). In this paper, we examine the frequency of landfalling tropical cyclones and associated rainfall properties over the eastern United States using Zetac, an 18-km resolution RCM designed for modeling Atlantic tropical cyclone activity. Simulations of 1980–2006 tropical cyclone frequency and rainfall intensity for the months of August–October are compared against results from previous studies and observation-based datasets. The 1980–2006 control simulations are then compared against results from three future climate scenarios: CMIP3/A1B (late twenty-first century) and CMIP5/RCP4.5 (early and late twenty-first century). In CMIP5 early and late twenty-first century projections, the frequency of occurrence of post-landfall tropical cyclones shows little net change over much of the eastern U.S. despite a decrease in frequency over the ocean. This reflects a greater landfalling fraction in CMIP5 projections, which is not seen in CMIP3-based projections. Average tropical cyclone rain rates over land within 500 km of the storm center increase by 8–17 % in the future climate projections relative to control. This is at least as much as expected from the Clausius–Clapeyron relation, which links a warmer atmosphere to greater atmospheric water vapor content. Over land, the percent enhancement of area-averaged rain rates from a given tropical cyclone in the warmer climate is greater for larger averaging radius (300–500 km) than near the storm, particularly for the CMIP3 projections. Although this study does not focus on attribution, the findings are broadly consistent with historical tropical cyclone rainfall changes documented in a recent observational study. The results may have important implications for future flood risks from tropical cyclones.

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Acknowledgments

This work was partially funded by the Willis Research Network, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Cooperative Institute for Climate Sciences (Grant NOAA CICS NA08OAR4320752), and the the National Science Foundation (Grant CBET-1058027) and the NASA Postdoctoral Program. We would like to thank Joseph Sirutis of NOAA GFDL for providing climate model data, Joshua Roundy of Princeton University and NASA GSFC for preparing the NLDAS rainfall data, and Timothy Marchok and Baoqiang Xiang of NOAA GFDL for their thoughtful comments.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. NASA Hydrological Sciences, Goddard Space Flight Center, 8800 Greenbelt Rd, Greenbelt, MD, 20771, USA

    Daniel B. Wright

  2. Oak Ridge Associated Universities, Oak Ridge, TN, 37831, USA

    Daniel B. Wright

  3. Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory/NOAA, Princeton, NJ, 08542, USA

    Thomas R. Knutson

  4. Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, 08544, USA

    James A. Smith

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Correspondence to Daniel B. Wright.

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Wright, D.B., Knutson, T.R. & Smith, J.A. Regional climate model projections of rainfall from U.S. landfalling tropical cyclones. Clim Dyn 45, 3365–3379 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00382-015-2544-y

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