ORCID

0000-0002-6492-2077 (Wallace), 0000-0002-7419-1159 (Sullivan)

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2024

DOI

10.1038/s41467-024-45112-6

Publication Title

Nature Communications

Volume

15

Issue

1

Pages

816 (1-10)

Abstract

Despite increased Atlantic hurricane risk, projected trends in hurricane frequency in the warming climate are still highly uncertain, mainly due to short instrumental record that limits our understanding of hurricane activity and its relationship to climate. Here we extend the record to the last millennium using two independent estimates: a reconstruction from sedimentary paleohurricane records and a statistical model of hurricane activity using sea surface temperatures (SSTs). We find statistically significant agreement between the two estimates and the late 20th century hurricane frequency is within the range seen over the past millennium. Numerical simulations using a hurricane-permitting climate model suggest that hurricane activity was likely driven by endogenous climate variability and linked to anomalous SSTs of warm Atlantic and cold Pacific. Volcanic eruptions can induce peaks in hurricane activity, but such peaks would likely be too weak to be detected in the proxy record due to large endogenous variability.

Rights

© The Authors 2024.

This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original authors and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder.

Data Availability

LME data are available from https://www.cesm.ucar.edu/community-projects/lme. LMR data are available from https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/access/paleo-search/study/27850. All other data used in this study are available from the Zenodo repository76. Source data are provided in this paper.

Original Publication Citation

Yang, W., Wallace, E., Vecchi, G. A., Donnelly, J. P., Emile-Geay, J., Hakim, G. J., Horowitz, L. W., Sullivan, R. M., Tardif, R., van Hengstum, P. J., & Winkler, T. S. (2024). Last millennium hurricane activity linked to endogenous climate variability. Nature Communications, 15(1), 1-10, Article 816. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-024-45112-6

Additional Files
Wallace-2024-LastMilleniumSupplementaryInfo.pdf (852 kB)
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