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. 2017 Nov 28;114(48):12681-12684.
doi: 10.1073/pnas.1716222114. Epub 2017 Nov 13.

Assessing the present and future probability of Hurricane Harvey's rainfall

Kerry Emanuel  1
Affiliations

Assessing the present and future probability of Hurricane Harvey's rainfall

Kerry Emanuel. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. .

Abstract

We estimate, for current and future climates, the annual probability of areally averaged hurricane rain of Hurricane Harvey's magnitude by downscaling large numbers of tropical cyclones from three climate reanalyses and six climate models. For the state of Texas, we estimate that the annual probability of 500 mm of area-integrated rainfall was about 1% in the period 1981-2000 and will increase to 18% over the period 2081-2100 under Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) AR5 representative concentration pathway 8.5. If the frequency of such event is increasingly linearly between these two periods, then in 2017 the annual probability would be 6%, a sixfold increase since the late 20th century.

Keywords: climate change; floods; hurricanes.

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Conflict of interest statement

Conflict of interest statement: K.E. is an officer of WindRiskTech, LLC, a firm that provides hurricane risk assessments to clients worldwide. The firm also provides data sets free of charge to scientific researchers.

Figures

Fig. 1.
Fig. 1.
Storm total rainfall (millimeters) from a simulated tropical cyclone driven by climate analysis data over the period 1980–2016. This simulated event took place in August and September 2006. The track of the storm center is indicated by the back curve; it approached Texas from the southeast, moved slowly around a counterclockwise path in coastal Texas, and exited toward the southeast.
Fig. 2.
Fig. 2.
Return periods of hurricane total rainfall (millimeters) at the single point of Houston, Texas, based on 3,700 simulated events each from three global climate analyses over the period 1980–2016. The dots show the three-climate-set mean and the shading shows 1 SD in storm frequency, remapped into return periods.
Fig. 3.
Fig. 3.
Return periods for hurricane storm total rainfall in the state of Texas, based on 3,700 simulated events from NCAR/NCEP reanalyses over the period 1979–2015.
Fig. 4.
Fig. 4.
Return periods of hurricane total rainfall (millimeters) at the single point of Houston, Texas, based on 3,700 simulated events each from six global climate models over the period 1981–2000 from historical simulations (blue), and 2081–2100 from RCP 8.5 simulations (red). The dots show the six-climate-set mean and the shading shows 1 SD in storm frequency, remapped into return periods.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

References

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