Tropical Cyclone Precipitation Changes due to Climate Change
Understanding how tropical cyclone (TC) precipitation will change due to climate change is difficult because of the numerous factors that impact it, including TC intensity, TC size, and environmental humidity. It is even more challenging to project how annual TC precipitation amounts in different regions of the world will change because of changes in TC intensity, size, landfall frequency, and translation speed due to climate change. In my research, I have utilized climate models run using future climate scenarios and as hindcasts to study individual TCs, mostly in the North Atlantic basin.
Huprikar, A., A. M. Stansfield and K. A. Reed (2024): A Storyline Analysis of Hurricane Irma's Precipitation Under Various Levels of Climate Warming. Environmental Research Letters, 19, 014004, doi:10.1088/1748-9326/ad0c89
Stansfield, A. M. and K. A. Reed (2023): Global Tropical Cyclone Precipitation Scaling with Sea Surface Temperature. npj Climate and Atmospheric Science, 6(60), doi:10.1038/s41612-023-00391-6
Reed, K. A., M. F. Wehner, A. M. Stansfield and C. M. Zarzycki (2021): Anthropogenic Influence on Hurricane Dorian’s Extreme Rainfall. [in “Explaining Extreme Events of 2019 from a Climate Perspective”]. Bull. Amer. Meteor. Soc., 102(1), S9-S16, doi:10.1175/BAMS-D-20-0160.1
Stansfield, A. M., K. A. Reed, and C. M. Zarzycki (2020): Changes in Precipitation from North Atlantic Tropical Cyclones under RCP Scenarios in the Variable-Resolution Community Atmosphere Model. Geophys. Res. Lett., 47, doi:10.1029/2019GL086930
Reed, K. A., A. M. Stansfield, M. F. Wehner, and C. M. Zarzycki (2020): Forecasted attribution of the human influence on Hurricane Florence. Science Advances, 6 (1). doi:10.1126/sciadv.aaw9253.
Idealized Modeling of Tropical Cyclones
TCs are complex weather systems that are often both influenced by and influencing the atmospheric and oceanic environments around them. Additionally, global climate models have only recently been run at grid spacings fine enough to resolve TCs, and many of the processes within these storms are still parameterized. These challenges cause biases in model climatologies and predictions of TCs. One strategy to learn more about TCs while limiting these biases is using idealized models, where some complex aspects of the atmosphere/ocean are reduced or eliminated by setting certain model parameters. Radiative convective equilibrium (RCE) is an example of one of these idealized environments.
Silvers, L. G., A. M. Stansfield, and K. A. Reed (2024): The impact of rotation on tropical climate, the hydrologic cycle, and climate sensitivity. Geophysical Research Letters, 51, e2023GL105850, doi:10.1029/2023GL105850
Stansfield, A. M. and K. A. Reed (2021): Tropical Cyclone Precipitation Response to Surface Warming in Aquaplanet Simulations with Uniform Thermal Forcing. JGR: Atmospheres, 126,e2021JD035197, doi:10.1029/2021JD035197
Objective Tracking of Storms and their Precipitation
When studying storms and their precipitation in climate models, first the storms have to be identified and tracked and then precipitation generated by those storms has to be extracted from the total precipitation field. As of now, this is mainly done by external tracking algorithms, such as TempestExtremes. This process also has to be done to relate observed storm tracks to precipitation observations from satellites and other precipitation products. This work is important to understand how much precipitation in different regions of the world come from different storm-types in different seasons and also how precipitation from these systems is changing over time.
Reed, K. A., A. M. Stansfield, W.-C. Hsu, G. J. Kooperman, A. A. Akinsanola, W. M. Hannah, A. G. Pendergrass, and B. Medeiros (2023): Evaluating the simulation of CONUS precipitation by storm type in next-generation configurations of E3SM. Geophysical Research Letters, 50, e2022GL102409, doi:10.1029/2022GL102409
Reed, A. T., A. M. Stansfield, and K. A. Reed (2022): Characterizing Long Island’s Extreme Precipitation and its Relationship to Tropical Cyclones. Atmosphere, 13(7), doi:10.3390/atmos13071070
Ullrich, P.A., C.M. Zarzycki, E.E. McClenny, M.C. Pinheiro, A.M. Stansfield and K.A. Reed (2021): TempestExtremes v2.0: A Community Framework for Feature Detection, Tracking and Analysis in Large Datasets. Geophys. Model Dev., 14(8), 5023-5048. doi:10.5194/gmd-14-5023-2021
Stansfield, A. M., K. A. Reed, C. M. Zarzycki, P. A. Ullrich, and D. R. Chavas (2020): Assessing Tropical Cyclones’ Contribution to Precipitation over the Eastern United States and Sensitivity to the Variable-Resolution Domain Extent. Journal of Hydrometeorology, 21, 1425-1445, doi:10.1175/JHM-D-19-0240.1.
Other Publications:
Thonis A., A. M. Stansfield, and H. Akcakaya (2024): Unraveling the role of tropical cyclones in shaping present species distributions. Global Change Biology, 30, e17232. doi: 10.1111/gcb.17232
Jones, A. D., D. Rastogi, P. Vahmani, A. M. Stansfield, K. A. Reed, T. Thurber, P. A. Ullrich, and J. Rice (2023): Continental United States Climate Projections based on Thermodynamic Modification of Historical Weather. Scientific Data, 10, 664. doi:10.1038/s41597-023-02485-5
Lintner, B. R., D. K. Adams, K. A. Schiro, A. M. Stansfield, A. A. Amorim Rocha, and J. D. Neelin (2017): Relationships among climatological vertical moisture structure, column water vapor, and precipitation over the central Amazon in observations and CMIP5 models. Geophys. Res. Lett., 44, 1981–1989. doi:10.1002/2016GL071923
