Typhoon Track Changes Associated with Global Warming

Abstract

ncreasing tropical cyclone (TC) influence in the subtropical East Asia and decreasing TC activity in the South China Sea over the past few decades have been researched in previous studies. The singular value decomposition (SVD) of observational data and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) climate change simulations in the Fourth Assessment Report (AR4) shows that the observed TC track changes are linked to the leading SVD mode of global sea surface temperature (SST) warming and the associated changes in large-scale steering flows. The selected five IPCC models can generally simulate the leading mode in their ensemble control run and prediction, suggesting the possible persistence of the reported track changes by 2040.