Abstract/Summary

In this article I describe the state of understanding at the end of the Deep South National Science Challenge concerning how tropical cyclones – TCs, such as 2023’s Gabrielle – may change in the future. TCs are some of the most destructive weather systems on Earth, and understanding how they may change in the future is of enormous societal and economic concern. A state-of-theart climate model is used, forced with several future climate scenarios to study TCs affecting the New Zealand region. UKESM1 is a coupled atmosphere-ocean earth system model and the TCs predicted by it are found using offline software which tracks the position of simulated pressure lows through time. The software used is validated against the tracks of cyclones from 1968 [Giselle] and 2023 [Gabrielle] as well as a different cyclone tracking software package. The power dissipation index, PDI, gives a first order measure of TC strength and it is found that the average PDI per storm increases with top-of atmosphere radiative forcing by up to 24% under a ‘fossil-fuelled development’ scenario, SSP5- 8.5. I conclude with a discussion on New Zealand’s future research landscape.