Climate change effects on North Atlantic cyclones

[1] We investigated the possible climate change impacts on midlatitude northwest Atlantic storms using a mesoscale atmospheric model driven by the second-generation Coupled Global Climate Model (CGCM2) environmental fields, for control (1975–1994) and high-CO2 (2040–2059) years of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) IS92a scenarios. Using ensemble experiments, we show that for a given storm initialization location, the high-CO2 climate change scenario results in slightly higher mean peak storm intensity than that of the control climate. However, the impact of averaged environmental scenario fields on storm intensity and track is dependent on the storm initialization location within these averaged scenario fields. Under the climate change scenario, storms that are initially located south of 35°N and west of 65°W exhibit the largest differences in storm intensities and tracks, compared to the present climate. Storms with trajectories that move close to the upper level steering jet exhibit the largest differences in mean tracks, moving closer to the North American coast.