Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, 94(4) (April 2013) 499-514; doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1175/BAMS-D-11-00262.1

Monitoring and Understanding Trends in Extreme Storms: State of Knowledge

Kenneth E. Kunkel, Thomas R. Karl, Harold Brooks, James Kossin, Jay H. Lawrimore, Derek Arndt, Lance Bosart, David Changnon, Susan L. Cutter, Nolan Doesken, Kerry Emanuel, Pavel Ya. Groisman, Richard W. Katz, Thomas Knutson, James O'Brien, Christopher J. Paciorek, Thomas C. Peterson, Kelly Redmond, David Robinson, Jeff Trapp, Russell Vose, Scott Weaver, Michael Wehner, Klaus Wolter and Donald Wuebbles

Abstract

The state of knowledge regarding trends and an understanding of their causes is presented for a specific subset of extreme weather and climate types. For severe convective storms (tornadoes, hailstorms, and severe thunderstorms), differences in time and space of practices of collecting reports of events make using the reporting database to detect trends extremely difficult. Overall, changes in the frequency of environments favorable for severe thunderstorms have not been statistically significant. For extreme precipitation, there is strong evidence for a nationally averaged upward trend in the frequency and intensity of events. The causes of the observed trends have not been determined with certainty, although there is evidence that increasing atmospheric water vapor may be one factor. For hurricanes and typhoons, robust detection of trends in Atlantic and western North Pacific tropical cyclone (TC) activity is significantly constrained by data heterogeneity and deficient quantification of internal variability. Attribution of past TC changes is further challenged by a lack of consensus on the physical linkages between climate forcing and TC activity. As a result, attribution of trends to anthropogenic forcing remains controversial. For severe snowstorms and ice storms, the number of severe regional snowstorms that occurred since 1960 was more than twice that of the preceding 60 years. There are no significant multidecadal trends in the areal percentage of the contiguous United States impacted by extreme seasonal snowfall amounts since 1900. There is no distinguishable trend in the frequency of ice storms for the United States as a whole since 1950.

Accepted: May 15, 2012

A supplement to this article is available online (10.1175/BAMS-D-11-00262.2)

 

Correspondence: Kenneth Kunkel, Cooperative Institute for Climate and Satellites, 151 Patton Ave., Asheville, NC 28801. e-mail: ken.kunkel@noaa.gov

http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/full/10.1175/BAMS-D-11-00262.1