Reliability Analysis of Climate Change of Tropical Cyclone Activity over the Western North Pacific

Data homogeneity has become a significant issue in the study of tropical cyclones (TCs) and climate change. In this study, three historical datasets for the western North Pacific TCs from the Joint Typhoon Warning Center (JTWC), Japan Meteorological Agency (JMA), and China Meteorological Administration (CMA) are compared with a focus on TC intensity. Over the past 55 years (1951–2005), significant discrepancies are found among the three datasets, especially between the CMA and JTWC datasets. The TC intensity in the CMA dataset was evidently overestimated in the 1950s and from the late 1960s to the early 1970s, while it was overestimated after 1988 in the JTWC dataset, especially during 1993–2003. Large discrepancies in TC tracks exist in two periods of 1951–early 1960s and 1988–1990s. Further analysis reveals that the discrepancies are obviously related to the TC observational techniques. Before the era of meteorological satellites (1951–the early 1960s), and after the termination of aircraft reconnaissance (since 1988), large discrepancies exist in both TC intensity and track. That the intensity discrepancy was smallest during the period (1973–87) when aircraft reconnaissance data and the Dvorak technique were both available suggests that availability of the aircraft reconnaissance and the Dvorak method helps in reducing the TC intensity discrepancy. For those TCs that were included in all the three datasets, no significant increasing or decreasing trend was found over the past 50 years. Each of the three TC datasets has individual characteristics that make it difficult to tell which one is the best. For TCs that affect China, the CMA dataset has obvious advantages such as more complete and more accurate information.