Warmer oceans bringing more severe tropical cyclones to land
Human-caused climate change has made certain typhoons more frequent and severe. Tropical cyclones can cause devastating and lethal damage to East and Southeast Asian countries. But accurately tracking changes in the frequency and intensity of typhoons is challenging in part because the data on these storms hasn’t always been consistently kept, and in part because there’s simply a lot of variability in the number of storms that make landfall. In a recent issue of Nature Geoscience, new cluster and bias-corrected analyses of storm data show that the intensity and frequency of these dangerous storms have increased considerably. This increase is most likely due to oceanic warming related to climate change. The authors of this paper focused on typhoons that strike East Asia, which limits the analysis to the northwest Pacific Ocean. They used a regional cluster analysis to probe the storm data, grouping the cyclones according to the part of the ocean where they formed and their movement patterns. This clustered analysis allowed the researchers to organize the inconsistent data in a way that allowed them to make inferences despite data variability.
