Composite mean fields and probability distribution functions (PDFs) of rain rate, cloud type and cover, cloud-top temperature, surface wind velocity, and water vapor path (WVP) are constructed using satellite observations of midlatitude cyclones from four oceanic regions (i.e., the North Pacific, South Pacific, North Atlantic, and South Atlantic). Reanalysis surface pressure fields are used to ...

A numerical model-based analysis of the quasigeostrophic forcing for ascent in the occluded quadrant of three cyclones is presented based upon a natural coordinate partitioning of the Q vector into its alongand acrossisentrope components, Qs and Qn, respectively. The Qn component describes the geostrophic contribution to the rate of change of the magnitude of =pu (traditional frontogenesis), wh...

10 The global network of subsea fibre-optic cables plays a critical role in the world economy and is 11 considered as strategic infrastructure for many nations. Sediment density flows have caused 12 significant disruption to this network in the recent past. These cable breaks represent the only 13 means to actively monitor such flows over large oceanic regions. Here, we use a global cable break...

Tropical storms, such as cyclones, hurricanes and typhoons, present major threats to coastal communities. Around two million people worldwide have died and millions have been injured over the past two centuries as a result of tropical storms. Bangladesh is especially vulnerable to tropical cyclones, with around 718 000 deaths from them in the past 50 years. However, cyclone-related mortality in...

As a disaster prone country, Bangladesh is regularly hit by natural hazards, including devastating cyclones, such as in 1970, 1991 and 2007. Although the number of cyclones' fatalities reduced from 0.3 million in 1970 to a few thousand or fewer in recent events, loss of lives and impact on livelihoods remains a concern. It depends on the meteorological characteristics of cyclone and the general...

With the advent of regional climate modelling, there are high–resolution data available for regional climatological change studies. Automatic tracking of cyclones in these datasets encounters problems with high spatial resolution due to cyclone substructure. Watershed segmentation, a technique from image analysis, has been used to obtain estimates for the spatial extent of cyclones, enabling be...

[1] Theory suggests tropical cyclone maximum potential intensity increases with increasing ocean temperature. However, most tropical cyclones fail to achieve this maximum intensity. Instead, empirical studies suggest that tropical cyclone intensities are uniformly distributed between this maximum potential intensity and an intensity that marks the transition between tropical storm and hurricane...

We present TECA, a parallel toolkit for detecting extreme events in large climate datasets. Modern climate datasets expose parallelism across a number of dimensions: spatial locations, timesteps and ensemble members. We design TECA to exploit these modes of parallelism and demonstrate a prototype implementation for detecting and tracking three classes of extreme events: tropical cyclones, extra...

Global natural disaster losses have risen dramatically in recent decades and tropical cyclones have contributed significantly to this trend. Tropical cyclones account for nine of the ten most costly inflation-adjusted insurance natural disaster losses (2009 dollars) between 1970 and 2009 (Swiss Re, 2010). Of these nine, eight impacted the US and surrounding areas and one impacted Japan. In orig...

Detection and attribution of past changes in cyclone activity are hampered by biased cyclone records due to changes in observational capabilities. Here we construct an independent record of Atlantic tropical cyclone activity on the basis of storm surge statistics from tide gauges. We demonstrate that the major events in our surge index record can be attributed to landfalling tropical cyclones; ...