Abstract
In this chapter, a review is given of progress to date on an intercomparison project designed to compare and evaluate the ability of climate models to generate tropical cyclones, the Tropical Cyclone climate Model Intercomparison Project (TC-MIP). Like other intercomparison projects, this project aims to evaluate climate models using common metrics in order to make suggestions regarding future development of such models. A brief summary is given of the current ability of these models and some initial conclusions are made. Coarser-resolution climate models appear to have difficulty simulating tropical formation in the Atlantic basin, but simply increasing the resolution of such models does not necessarily lead to improved simulations in this region. The choice of convective scheme is also important in determining the tropical cyclone formation rate. There appears to be little relationship between the simulated details of the large-scale climate and model tropical cyclone formation rates, and possible reasons are given for this. Recent fine-resolution models have shown considerable improvement in their simulation of both global and Atlantic tropical cyclone formation, leading to the possibility that such models could be used for detection and attribution studies of the causes of observed changes in tropical cyclone formation rate, particularly in the Atlantic basin.
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www.earthsci.unimelb.edu.au/ kwalsh/tcmip_index.html
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Acknowledgments
The authors would like to thank the Australian Research Council Network for Earth System Science (ARCNESS) and Woodside Energy for supplying funding for the creation of the data sets analysed in this project. We would like to thank Aurel Moise, Aaron McDonough and Peter Edwards of the CSIRO’s Advanced Scientific Computing group for assistance in creating a subset of the PCMDI data set, and the CSIRO Climate Adaptation Flagship for supplying funding for a related project. We would like to thank Damien Irving of CSIRO, who worked on an earlier version of this document. The authors would also like to thank their respective institutions for supporting this work. This chapter is a considerably extended version of a paper presented at the Centre for Australian Weather and Climate Research (CAWCR) Modelling Workshop, held November 25–28, 2009.
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Walsh, K., Lavender, S., Murakami, H., Scoccimarro, E., Caron, LP., Ghantous, M. (2010). The Tropical Cyclone Climate Model Intercomparison Project. In: Elsner, J., Hodges, R., Malmstadt, J., Scheitlin, K. (eds) Hurricanes and Climate Change. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-9510-7_1
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