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Exploring the relationship between African easterly waves and North Atlantic hurricanes with the E3SM model experiments
Authors
Yumin Moon, University of Washington
Abstract
We plan to use the E3SM model to explore the relationship between North Atlantic tropical cyclones (TCs) and variability of African easterly waves (AEWs). Over the North Atlantic Ocean, a large proportion of precursor disturbances for TCs are provided by AEWs. However, the relationship between AEW variability and North Atlantic TC activity on a longer time scale remains unclear, with the correlations between them varying depending on the details of the analysis method. A recent modeling study also indicated that suppressing AEWs produced no significant changes in the North Atlantic TC activity, which raised a possibility that there may not be a causal relationship between AEWs and North Atlantic TCs. We plan to explore this hypothesis by performing E3SM model experiments. First, we will compute the mean states of the E3SM simulations and then nudge relevant prognostic variables in additional experiments toward the control climatology over the regions of significant AEW activity near the coast of west Africa. These nudging experiments with the E3SM model will help us better understand the role of AEWs on North Atlantic TC activity.