QuestionsCategory: QuestionsDo tropical cyclones impact climate?
Clean Harbors Staff asked 9 months ago

Do tropical cyclones (TCs) have a global impact on climate? Maybe in terms of their impact on air-sea heat or gas fluxes? For example cooling the surface ocean, or enhancing CO2 fluxes?

The motivation behind this question is that CMIP6-type Earth system models (ESMs) are often too coarse in resolution to represent TCs. If climate were represented with a high-resolution model, which can reproduce TCs and their air-sea interactions, what aspect of the global climate would potentially be better represented? Would this improvement be relevant at the global scale? Would this be a good reason to push ESMs towards high resolution?