Climate models are capable of producing features similar to tropical cyclones, but typically display strong biases for many of the storm physical characteristics due to their relatively coarse resolution compared to the size of the storms themselves. One strategy that has been adopted to circumvent this limitation is through the use of a hybrid downscaling technique, wherein a large set of synthetic tracks are created by seeding disturbances in the large-scale environment. Here, we evaluate the ability of this technique at reproducing many of the characteristics of the recent North Atlantic hurricane activity as well as its sensitivity to the choice of the reanalysis dataset used as boundary conditions. In particular, we show that the geographical and intensity distributions are well reproduced, but that the technique has difficulty capturing the large difference in activity observed between the most recent active and quiescent phase. Although the signal is somewhat reduced compared to observation, the technique also detects a significant decrease in the intensification rate of hurricanes near the coastal US during the active phase compared to the quiescent phase. Finally, the influence of the El Niño Southern Oscillation on hurricane activity is generally well captured as well, but the technique fails to reproduce the increase in activity over the western part of the basin during Modoki El Niños.

We would like to thank NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information for making the IBTrACS data available. JPB and LPC would like to acknowledge the financial support from the Ministerio de Economa y Competitividad (MINECO; Project GL2014-55764-R). LPC’s contract is co-financed by the MINECO under Juan de la Cierva Incorporacin postdoctoral fellowship number IJCI-2015-23367. MB would like to acknowledge financial support from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC) of Canada. Finally, we are grateful to Kerry Emanuel for providing the data as well as some useful feedback, and two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments.

Peer Reviewed