The future of wind shear: will it decrease the number of hurricanes?

Could global warming increase wind shear over the Atlantic, potentially leading to a decrease in the frequency of Atlantic hurricanes? Several modeling studies are now predicting this, and it is a reasonable hypothesis. The most recent study, "Simulated reduction in Atlantic hurricane frequency under twenty-first-century warming conditions", was published Sunday in Nature Geosciences. The authors, led by Tom Knutson of NOAA's GFDL laboratory, showed that global warming may reduce the number of Atlantic tropical storms by 27% and hurricanes by 18% by the end of the century. However, their model also found that the strongest hurricanes would get stronger.

An important reason that their model predicted a decrease in the frequency of Atlantic hurricanes was due to a predicted increase in wind shear. As I explain in my wind shear tutorial, a large change of wind speed with height over a hurricane creates a shearing force that tends to tear the storm apart. The amount of wind shear is critical in determining whether a hurricane can form or survive.

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If true, Vecchi and Soden's results imply that we may see fewer hurricanes in the Atlantic and Eastern Pacific by the end of the century, since wind shear is such an important ingredient in their formation. How reliable are these model predictions? If global warming is expected to cause a slowdown in the Walker Circulation and increased wind shear over the tropical Atlantic, shouldn't we be able to see these effects already? There is some evidence that we are seeing these effects. According an article by the same authors published in 2006 in Nature, the observed 0.5-0.6°C global warming in the past century has caused the Walker Circulation to slow down by 3.5%--in line with what theory predicts. Moreover, Wang and Lee (2008) documented a 3 mph increase in wind shear over the tropical Atlantic between 1949-2006 (despite some rather low shear years recently, such as during the record-breaking Hurricane Season of 2005). These results, plus the fact that 13 of the 18 IPCC models predict a tropical Atlantic wind shear increase in the coming century, make the hypothesis that we may see increased wind shear over the Atlantic in coming decades a reasonable one. However, climate scientists Ray Pierrehumbert and Rasmus Benestad argue in a 2006 post on realclimate.org that we need another ten years of observations of the Walker Circulation to confirm that we really are seeing a slowdown. In addition, we need to see if the model predictions of increased wind shear hold up when improved simulations with better data and higher resolutions are performed. These models are fairly primitive in their abilities to simulate these sort of regional climate shifts, and some models predict a strengthening of the Walker Circulation in coming decades--the opposite of what Vecchi and Soden found.

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