Evidence of rising and poleward shift of storm surge in western North Pacific in recent decades

Recently, there has been considerable interest in examining how sea-level extremes due to storm surge may be related to climate change. Evidence of how storm-surge extremes have evolved since the start of the most recent warming of mid-1970s and early 1980s has not been firmly established however. Here we use 64 years (1950–2013) of observations and model simulations, and find evidence of a significant rise in the intensity as well as poleward-shifting of location of typhoon surges in the western North Pacific after 1980s. The rising and poleward-shifting trends are caused by the weakening of the steering flow in the tropics, which is related to climate warming, resulting in slower-moving and longer-lasting typhoons which had shifted northward.