Climate Change and Hurricane Frequency: Will We See More Storms, or Not?

Dr. Boniface Fosu

Assistant Professor, Mississippi State University

The impact of climate change on tropical cyclones (TCs), also known as hurricanes, is a subject of significant interest, given its social and economic implications. As anthropogenic greenhouse gases increase, there is an expected rise in TC intensity, storm surge, and precipitation. However, future changes in TC frequency are less certain, which is crucial since all the aforementioned TC hazards hinge upon the occurrence of a TC. Several studies suggest a decline in global TC frequency due to climate change, while an equal number report an increase, especially at the level of individual basins, resulting in significant uncertainty. This uncertainty arises partly due to biases in the simulation of sea surface temperature (SST) in climate models. In this talk, I will present the downscaled projections of TC frequency from 12 state-of-the-art climate models, with a focus on the Atlantic and Western North Pacific Basins. I will juxtapose these results with TC activity from a flux-corrected version of the Community Earth System Model (CESM), in which we nudge the model's climatological SST and momentum fluxes towards the observed, providing a potential constraint on projections of future TC activity. This discussion aims to shed light on the prevailing challenges in TC projections, underscoring the need for more research to enhance our readiness to deal with potential future changes.

Bio: Dr. Boniface Fosu joined the Department of Geosciences at Mississippi State University in January 2022, with a joint appointment at the Northern Gulf Institute. He received his Ph.D. in Climate Science at Utah State University in 2018 and proceeded to complete two postdoctoral research positions in tropical ocean interactions at the Georgia Institute of Technology and in tropical cyclone risk modeling at the Columbia University Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. Dr. Fosu’s research interests include analyzing and developing attribution to extreme events and using both empirical and numerical modeling techniques to infer constraints on future changes. An important objective of his research is to incorporate better process understanding into projections of climate extremes.