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Divergent responses of tropical cyclone genesis factors to strong volcanic eruptions at different latitudes

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Abstract

To understand the behaviors of tropical cyclones (TCs), it is very important to explore how TCs respond to anthropogenic greenhouse gases and natural forcings. Volcanic eruptions are a major natural forcing mechanism because they inject sulphate aerosols into the stratosphere, which modulate the global climate by absorbing and scattering solar radiation. The number of Atlantic hurricanes is thought to be reduced following strong tropical eruptions, but whether the response of TCs varies with the locations of the volcanoes and the different ocean basins remains unknown. Here, we use the Community Earth System Model-Last Millennium Ensemble to investigate the response of the large-scale environmental factors that spawn TCs to strong volcanic eruptions at different latitudes. A composite analysis indicates that tropical and northern hemisphere volcanic eruptions lead to significantly unfavorable conditions for TC genesis over the whole Pacific basin and the North Atlantic during the 3 years post-eruption, relative to the preceding 3 years. Southern hemisphere volcanic eruptions result in obviously unfavorable conditions for TC formation over the southwestern Pacific, but more favorable conditions over the North Atlantic. The mean response over the Indian Ocean is generally muted and insignificant. It should be noted that volcanic eruptions impact on environmental conditions through both the direct effect (i.e. on radiative forcing) and the indirect effect (i.e. on El Niño-Southern Oscillation), which is not differentiated in this study. In addition, the spread of the TC genesis response is considerably large for each category of eruptions over each ocean basin, which is also seen in the observational/proxy-based records. This large spread is attributed to the differences in stratospheric aerosol distributions, initial states and eruption intensities, and makes the short-term forecast of TC activity following the next large eruption challenging.

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Acknowledgements

We thank the NCAR groups for producing and making available the CESM-LME outputs. We thank Kerry Emanuel for making available his potential intensity algorithm. We thank the two anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments, which significantly improved this paper. This study was jointly funded by the National Key Research and Development Program of China (2016YFA0600704), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (41402158 and 41472160), and Thousand Talents Program for Distinguished Young Scholars (For Zhang Z.Z.).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Nansen-Zhu International Research Centre, Institute of Atmospheric Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, 40 Huayanli, Chaoyang District, Beijing, 100029, China

    Qing Yan

  2. Key Laboratory of Meteorological Disaster/Collaborative Innovation Center on Forecast and Evaluation of Meteorological Disasters, Nanjing University of Information Science and Technology, Nanjing, 210044, China

    Qing Yan & Huijun Wang

  3. Department of Atmospheric Science, School of Environmental Studies, China University of Geosciences, Wuhan, China

    Zhongshi Zhang

  4. Uni Research Climate, Bjerknes Center for Climate Research, Bergen, Norway

    Zhongshi Zhang

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  1. Qing Yan
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  2. Zhongshi Zhang
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  3. Huijun Wang
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Correspondence to Qing Yan.

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Yan, Q., Zhang, Z. & Wang, H. Divergent responses of tropical cyclone genesis factors to strong volcanic eruptions at different latitudes. Clim Dyn 50, 2121–2136 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00382-017-3739-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00382-017-3739-1

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