Identification of changes in the North Atlantic cyclogenesis using a Gaussian mixture model

Several climate models suggest that the frequency and intensity of tropical cyclones will change at the end of the 21st century, as consequence of global warming. Several scientific reports have described how global warming affects the intensity of tropical cyclones. However, little research has been done on the impact of global warming on cyclogenesis in different ocean basins. In this work, the number of cyclogenetic regions and their corresponding centroids are estimated in the North Atlantic Ocean basin for the intervals 1951-1975 versus 1976-2013 and 1951-1989 versus 1990-2013 through a finite Gaussian mixture model, to determine whether significant changes exist. In this study, the change from one interval to another will be attributed to climate change. The parameter estimation of the probability density function (fdp) of the mixture components was done using the Expectation-Maximization algorithm (EM). The fdp were compared using the Bhattacharyya's distance and the 95th percentile was estimated using the technique of parametric bootstrap. The results show that there are only two cyclogenic regions in each of the intervals that is no increase or decrease in the number of regions. A second result indicates that there are significant differences in the centroid's locations from one interval to another, suggestion an impact due to climate change according to the analyzed data.