Quantifying the Influence of Climate on Storm Activity Using Machine Learning

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Hadas, Or, Kaspi, Yohai
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Hadas, Or
Kaspi, Yohai
author_facet Hadas, Or
Kaspi, Yohai
contents Extratropical storms shape midlatitude weather and vary due to the slowly evolving climate and the rapid changes in synoptic conditions. While the influence of each factor has been studied extensively, their relative importance remains unclear. Here, we quantify the climate's relative importance in mean storm activity and individual storm development using 84 years of ERA-5 data and convolutional neural networks. We find that the constructed model predicts over 90% of the variability in the mean storm activity. However, a similar model predicts about a third of the variability in individual storm properties, such as maximum intensity, showing their variability is dominated by synoptic conditions. Isolating the impact of present-day climate change on individual storms shows it contributes to about 0.1% for storm-intensity variability, whereas its contribution to storms' heat-anomaly variability is over three times greater, highlighting that focusing on variables directly tied to global warming offers a clearer attribution pathway.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2504_20521
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Quantifying the Influence of Climate on Storm Activity Using Machine Learning
Hadas, Or
Kaspi, Yohai
Atmospheric and Oceanic Physics
Extratropical storms shape midlatitude weather and vary due to the slowly evolving climate and the rapid changes in synoptic conditions. While the influence of each factor has been studied extensively, their relative importance remains unclear. Here, we quantify the climate's relative importance in mean storm activity and individual storm development using 84 years of ERA-5 data and convolutional neural networks. We find that the constructed model predicts over 90% of the variability in the mean storm activity. However, a similar model predicts about a third of the variability in individual storm properties, such as maximum intensity, showing their variability is dominated by synoptic conditions. Isolating the impact of present-day climate change on individual storms shows it contributes to about 0.1% for storm-intensity variability, whereas its contribution to storms' heat-anomaly variability is over three times greater, highlighting that focusing on variables directly tied to global warming offers a clearer attribution pathway.
title Quantifying the Influence of Climate on Storm Activity Using Machine Learning
topic Atmospheric and Oceanic Physics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.20521