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Responses of tropical cyclones (TCs) to CO2 doubling are explored using coupled global climate models (GCMs) with increasingly refined atmospheric/land horizontal grids (~ 200 km, ~ 50 km and ~ 25 km). The three models exhibit similar changes in background climate fields thought to regulate TC activity, such as relative sea surface temperature (SST), potential intensity, and wind shear. However, global TC frequency decreases substantially in the 50 km model, while the 25 km model shows no significant change. The ~ 25 km model also has a substantial and spatially-ubiquitous increase of Category 3–4–5 hurricanes. Idealized perturbation experiments are performed to understand the TC response. Each model’s transient fully-coupled 2 × CO2 TC activity response is largely recovered by “time-slice” experiments using time-invariant SST perturbations added to each model’s own SST climatology. The TC response to SST forcing depends on each model’s background climatological SST biases: removing these biases leads to a global TC intensity increase in the ~ 50 km model, and a global TC frequency increase in the ~ 25 km model, in response to CO2-induced warming patterns and CO2 doubling. Isolated CO2 doubling leads to a significant TC frequency decrease, while isolated uniform SST warming leads to a significant global TC frequency increase; the ~ 25 km model has a greater tendency for frequency increase. Global TC frequency responds to both (1) changes in TC “seeds”, which increase due to warming (more so in the ~ 25 km model) and decrease due to higher CO2 concentrations, and (2) less efficient development of these“seeds” into TCs, largely due to the nonlinear relation between temperature and saturation specific humidity.

Previous studies have documented that surface wind speed (u) has been increasing over the ocean but decreasing over land for the past several decades. The decreasing u at the surface over land has been referred to as terrestrial stilling. A plausible hypothesis for terrestrial stilling is an increase in surface roughness associated with changes in land surface (e.g. enhanced vegetation growth, landscape fragmentation or urbanization). One of the most widespread land surface changes is enhanced vegetation leaf area index (LAI) known as greening, particularly over the middle to high latitudes of the Northern Hemisphere where strong stilling is observed from weather station data. In this study, we examine the hypothesis that enhanced vegetation LAI is a key driver of global terrestrial stilling. We first characterized the trend in u over the ocean using long-term satellite altimeter measurements, and the trend in u over land using continuous wind records from 4305 in situ meteorological stations. We then performed initial condition ensemble Atmospheric Model Intercomparison Project-type simulations using two state-of-the-art Earth system models (IPSL-CM and CESM) to isolate the response of u to the historical increase in LAI (representing the greening) for the period 1982-2011. Both models, forced with observed sea surface temperature and sea ice and with LAI from satellite observation, captured the observed strengthening of Pacific trade winds and Southern Ocean westerly winds. However, these simulations did not reproduce the weakening of surface winds over land as significantly as it appears in the observations (-0.006 m s -1 versus -0.198 m s -1 during 1982-2011), indicating that enhanced LAI (greening) is not a dominant driver for terrestrial stilling.