Elsner James B, Kossin James P, Jagger Thomas H
Department of Geography, Florida State University, Tallahassee, Florida 32306, USA.
Nature. 2008 Sep 4;455(7209):92-5. doi: 10.1038/nature07234.
Atlantic tropical cyclones are getting stronger on average, with a 30-year trend that has been related to an increase in ocean temperatures over the Atlantic Ocean and elsewhere. Over the rest of the tropics, however, possible trends in tropical cyclone intensity are less obvious, owing to the unreliability and incompleteness of the observational record and to a restricted focus, in previous trend analyses, on changes in average intensity. Here we overcome these two limitations by examining trends in the upper quantiles of per-cyclone maximum wind speeds (that is, the maximum intensities that cyclones achieve during their lifetimes), estimated from homogeneous data derived from an archive of satellite records. We find significant upward trends for wind speed quantiles above the 70th percentile, with trends as high as 0.3 +/- 0.09 m s(-1) yr(-1) (s.e.) for the strongest cyclones. We note separate upward trends in the estimated lifetime-maximum wind speeds of the very strongest tropical cyclones (99th percentile) over each ocean basin, with the largest increase at this quantile occurring over the North Atlantic, although not all basins show statistically significant increases. Our results are qualitatively consistent with the hypothesis that as the seas warm, the ocean has more energy to convert to tropical cyclone wind.
大西洋热带气旋平均正变得更强，其30年的趋势与大西洋及其他地区海洋温度的升高有关。然而，在热带地区的其他地方，热带气旋强度的可能趋势不太明显，这是由于观测记录的不可靠性和不完整性，以及在以往的趋势分析中对平均强度变化的关注有限。在这里，我们通过研究从卫星记录档案中获取的同质数据估算出的每个气旋最大风速的上百分位数（即气旋在其生命周期内达到的最大强度）的趋势，克服了这两个限制。我们发现，第70百分位数以上的风速百分位数有显著的上升趋势，最强气旋的趋势高达0.3±0.09米/秒·年（标准误差）。我们注意到每个海洋盆地中最强热带气旋（第99百分位数）的估计生命周期最大风速都有单独的上升趋势，在这个百分位数上，北大西洋的增幅最大，尽管并非所有盆地都显示出统计学上的显著增加。我们的结果在定性上与这样的假设一致，即随着海洋变暖，海洋有更多能量转化为热带气旋风。
