Are we confident in the projections by global models of future changes in moist stability and shear over the Atlantic?
There are several aspects to this question, firstly with respect to the tropics as a whole, and secondly with respect to the Atlantic relative to the rest of the tropics. All of the world’s global climate models (to our knowledge) predict that the tropics as a whole will stay rather close to a moist adiabat as the oceans warm. Is it possible that this prediction is in error? If there is a uniform destabilization of the tropics associated with global warming, this would have dramatic consequences for tropical storms throughout the world and for all of tropical meteorology. We are personally sceptical that the moist stability of the tropics as a whole is easily changed, but it is clearly vitally important to reconcile models and observations of recent trends in tropical stability. The results in this paper are entirely dependent on this prediction of small changes in moist stability. As discussed above, it is plausible that the stability of the Atlantic atmosphere relative to the tropica
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- What information do we use from global model projections when we downscale to project changes in Atlantic tropical storm activity?
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- Are we confident in the projections by global models of future changes in moist stability and shear over the Atlantic?
