Open AccessImpact of climate change on the frequency of Northern Hemisphere summer cyclones
Author(s) -
Lang Chang,
Waugh Darryn W.
Publication year - 2011
Publication title -
journal of geophysical research: atmospheres
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.67
H-Index - 298
eISSN - 2156-2202
pISSN - 0148-0227
DOI - 10.1029/2010jd014300
Subject(s) - climatology , environmental science , northern hemisphere , climate change , consistency (knowledge bases) , extratropical cyclone , cyclone (programming language) , climate model , atmospheric sciences , meteorology , geography , geology , oceanography , mathematics , geometry , field programmable gate array , computer science , computer hardware
The potential impact of increasing greenhouse gases on the frequency of Northern Hemisphere summer cyclones is examined using daily‐averaged mean sea level pressure from climate models used in the latest assessment report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Previous studies have found that the models consistently show a strong decrease for winter cyclones. In contrast, there are much smaller changes in the frequency of summer cyclones and little consistency among the models. In particular, there is no consistency among the models as to whether the frequency of hemispheric‐averaged summer cyclones will increase or decrease. For some subregions the sign of the trend is consistent across the vast majority of models, but even then there is a large spread in the magnitude of the trends. The general lack of consistency among models indicates that care is required when interpreting projected changes in summer weather systems.