Intense tropical cyclones; how are they represented in a future climate? Exploring tropical cyclones in the South-West Indian Ocean with km-scale climate simulations

Oral Presentation

As a global hotspot for cyclonic activity, southern Africa regularly suffers with the devastation from tropical cyclones (TCs). Last year, TC Freddy made landfall bringing large scale destruction, a humanitarian crisis and around 1,500 deaths, making it one of the worst TCs on record to hit southern Africa. Recent studies indicate that the proportion of intense TCs like Freddy are projected to increase, demonstrating a need for a more in-depth understanding of how local TC characteristics could differ under climate change.

Representing the latest advances in model development, 7 convection-permitting climate simulations are being run over the African continent. In conjunction with HighResMIP and NextGEMS, CP4A will provide fresh insights at convection-permitting scale into the spatial/temporal distributions and characteristics of TCs (e.g. speed, intensification rate and inland propagation) in this relatively under-studied and vulnerable region to climate change.

In this talk, I present initial evaluations of the performance of CP4A for modelling tropical cyclones. We anticipate CP4A at 4.5 km resolution will offer substantial improvements for representing TC characteristics compared to coarser resolution simulations. Additionally, I show how improvements in regional physics configurations affect model performance for representing TCs, crucial for future regional and global model development.