Projections of future tropical cyclone frequency are uncertain, ranging from a slight increase to a considerable decrease according to climate models. Estimation of how much the Earth’s surface temperature warms in response to greenhouse gas increase, quantified by effective climate sensitivity, is also uncertain. These two uncertainties have historically been studied independently as they concern different scales: One quantifies the extreme weather and the other the mean climate. Here, we show that these two uncertainties are not independent and are both influenced by the response of tropical clouds to warming. Across climate models, we show an anticorrelation between shortwave cloud radiative feedback and changes in the frequency of seed vortices, a prevalent type of tropical cyclone precursors. We further show an anticorrelation between effective climate sensitivity and tropical cyclone frequency changes, suggesting that global tropical cyclone frequency tends to decrease more substantially in models with larger temperature increase.

中文翻译：

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热带气旋种子和气候敏感性对热带云响应的依赖性


根据气候模式，对未来热带气旋频率的预测是不确定的，范围从略有增加到大幅减少。通过有效的气候敏感性来量化地球表面温度因温室气体增加而变暖多少的估计也是不确定的。这两个不确定性历来都是独立研究的，因为它们涉及不同的尺度：一个量化极端天气，另一个量化平均气候。在这里，我们表明这两个不确定性不是独立的，都受到热带云对变暖的响应的影响。在气候模型中，我们显示了短波云辐射反馈与种子涡旋频率变化之间的反相关，种子涡旋是一种普遍的热带气旋前兆类型。我们进一步显示了有效气候敏感性与热带气旋频率变化之间的反相关，表明全球热带气旋频率在温度升高较大的模型中往往会下降得更明显。