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  • Matters Arising
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Climate change and tropical cyclone trend

Nature volume 570, pages E3–E5 (2019)Cite this article

Matters Arising to this article was published on 05 June 2019

The Original Article was published on 06 June 2018

ARISING FROM J. P. Kossin Nature https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-018-0158-3 (2018)

Understanding the response of tropical cyclones to a changing climate has become a topic of great interest and research. Kossin1 showed that tropical-cyclone translation speed (TCS) has decreased globally by 10% over the period 1949–2016 and stated that this is consistent with the expected changes in atmospheric circulation forced by anthropogenic warming. However, we question the robustness of his conclusions1 for the following reasons: (1) TCSs generally increase with the latitude of the tropical cyclones and are therefore very sensitive to the bias of tropical-cyclone detection with respect to latitude; and (2) in the pre-satellite era (1949–1965), there is a high possibility that systematic biases in the detection of tropical cyclones exist in the best-track data, which could produce spurious trends in TCS. Therefore, the slowdown of TCS stated1 may not be a real climate signal or it may be exaggerated.

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Fig. 1: Changes in mean TCS according to latitude, basin and time along with their mean latitudes and percentages at sea points.

Data availability

The tropical cyclone data were taken from the International Best Track Archive for Climate Stewardship (IBTrACS; https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/ibtracs).

Code availability

All codes used to analyse and plot the data are available from the corresponding author on request.

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Acknowledgements

This research was supported by the Basic Science Research Program through the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF) funded by the Ministry of Education (2017R1A2B2005019) and the Korea Meteorological Administration Research and Development Program under grant KMI2018-07610.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Typhoon Research Center, Jeju National University, Jeju, South Korea

    Il-Ju Moon & Sung-Hun Kim

  2. Guy Carpenter Asia-Pacific Climate Impact Centre, School of Energy and Environment, City University of Hong Kong, Kowloon Tong, Hong Kong, China

    Johnny C. L. Chan

Authors
  1. Il-Ju Moon
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  2. Sung-Hun Kim
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  3. Johnny C. L. Chan
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Contributions

I.-J.M. conceived the idea, designed the study, and wrote the Comment. S.-H.K. conducted most of the analysis and discovered the main results. J.C.L.C. contributed to the interpretation of the results and editing of the manuscript.

Corresponding authors

Correspondence to Il-Ju Moon or Sung-Hun Kim.

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Moon, IJ., Kim, SH. & Chan, J.C.L. Climate change and tropical cyclone trend. Nature 570, E3–E5 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-019-1222-3

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