Historical and Future Windstorms in the Northeastern United States

Large-scale windstorms represent an important atmospheric hazard in the Northeastern US (NE) and are associated with substantial socioeconomic losses. Regional simulations performed with the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model using lateral boundary conditions from three Earth System Models (ESMs: Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory (GFDL), Hadley Centre Global Environment Model (HadGEM) and Max Planck Institute (MPI)) are used to quantify possible future changes in windstorm characteristics and/or changes in the parent cyclone types responsible for windstorms. WRF nested within MPI ESM best represents important aspects of historical windstorms and the cyclone types responsible for generating windstorms compared with a reference simulation performed with the ERA-Interim reanalysis for the historical climate. The spatial scale and frequency of the largest windstorms in each simulation defined using the greatest extent of exceedance of local 99.9th percentile wind speeds (U > U999) plus 50-year return period wind speeds (U50,RP) do not exhibit secular trends. Projections of extreme wind speeds and windstorm intensity/frequency/geolocation and dominant parent cyclone type associated with windstorms vary markedly across the simulations. Only the MPI nested simulations indicate statistically significant differences in windstorm spatial scale, frequency and intensity over the NE in the future and historical periods. This model chain, which also exhibits the highest fidelity in the historical climate, yields evidence of future increases in 99.9th percentile 10 m height wind speeds, the frequency of simultaneous U > U999 over a substantial fraction (5–25%) of the NE and the frequency of maximum wind speeds above 22.5 ms−1. These geophysical changes, coupled with a projected doubling of population, leads to a projected tripling of a socioeconomic loss index, and hence risk to human systems, from future windstorms.