Work

Contextualizing contemporary seasonality variations in East Asian tropical cyclone landfalls with a multi-century historical baseline

Year: 2026

Type: article

Abstract: Paleoclimate records provide a critical long-term perspective on natural climate variability, essential for understanding contemporary climate variations. However, existing paleoclimate proxies lack sufficient spatial-temporal coverage for studying high-impact weather extremes like tropical cyclones (TCs). Here we introduce a multi-source framework that contextualizes the contemporary TC landfalls in East Asia against a multi-century baseline (1368-1911) reconstructed from historical documents. Leveraging pre-industrial and contemporary-era data, the analysis reveals that the relatively small shift toward earlier landfalls in the contemporary era (1946-2020) falls well within the range of fluctuations documented historically (1651-1900). Rather than indicating detectable anthropogenic changes, these results suggest the dominance of natural variability in modulating landfall timing. Our work also suggests consistent natural controls of TC timing in contemporary and pre-industrial eras. This consistency lends credibility to pre-industrial observational datasets and climate simulations, providing a robust template for assessing changes in the seasonality of high-impact extremes.

Source: npj Climate and Atmospheric Science

DOI: 10.1038/s41612-026-01354-3

Authors: Gan Zhang, Kuanhui Elaine Lin, Dan Fu, Thomas Knutson, Jörg Franke, Wan-Ling Tseng