Ocean waves boost typhoon forecasts

Chinese researchers have developed a groundbreaking tropical cyclone forecasting model that factors in ocean surface waves, significantly improving predictions of how quickly strong storms intensify.

The breakthrough, detailed in a study published recently in the journal Communications Earth &Environment, addresses one of meteorology's toughest challenges: predicting a storm's strength. While forecasters have become much better at predicting where a typhoon will travel, forecasting its intensity has remained difficult.

Conducted by a team at the First Institute of Oceanography under the Ministry of Natural Resources in Qingdao, Shandong province, the study builds on over 20 years of research into how the ocean and the atmosphere interact.

"Accurate forecasts mean more precise and targeted preventive measures to protect lives," said Qiao Fangli, a veteran research fellow at the institute who led the research team. He noted that the new model marks a major advance in China's forecasting capabilities while offering benefits to communities worldwide.

The persistent difficulty in predicting storm intensity comes down to how older models represented ocean processes.

First-generation models focused almost entirely on atmospheric conditions and treated the sea surface as a static background. As a result, they tended to overestimate the strength of weak storms while severely underestimating strong ones.

Second-generation models added a link between the atmosphere and the ocean, capturing how typhoons cool the water beneath them. This reduced errors for weak and moderate storms, but strong typhoons were still predicted to be weaker than they actually were.

The new third-generation model solves this by introducing ocean surface waves into the picture.

"Under a tropical cyclone, the ocean surface is neither flat nor quiet. It is moving, wave-covered and dynamically active," Qiao explained. "Surface wave processes directly affect how much energy a tropical cyclone receives and loses, which drives its intensity."

Specifically, breaking waves create sea spray, which acts like a booster fuel by transferring heat and moisture from the warm ocean into the storm. At the same time, shifting wave patterns change the friction between the air and water, while nonbreaking waves churn the upper ocean, altering water temperatures.

By combining all these wave effects, the new model captures how strong typhoons rapidly gain power without overestimating weaker storms. It also creates a far more realistic balance between a storm's maximum wind speeds and its central air pressure.

To test the system, researchers ran reforecasts for 37 strong typhoons in the Northwest Pacific that underwent rapid intensification between 2020 and 2024. The third-generation model improved peak intensity predictions three days in advance by 82 percent compared with the average performance of major international operational forecasting models.

The technology is already moving from the lab to real-world defense.

Xu Weiming, director of the Ministry of Natural Resources' South China Sea Marine Forecast and Hazard Mitigation Center, said operational forecasting centers in China have begun applying the study's findings.

In the future, experts plan to combine this third-generation wave model with artificial intelligence to provide even faster, more accurate early warnings for rapidly intensifying typhoons.