Latitudinal distribution of landing tropical cyclones over mainland China

Abstract

Landfall location is an important research topic in studies of tropical cyclones. For tropical cyclones that made landfall over mainland China during 1951-2010, in this work, we analyze the temporal variations in the annual landfall frequency. We first study the distribution and temporal variations in the landing latitude. To avoid the inaccuracy associated with using a single dataset, in this work we adopt three best track datasets from China, the USA, and Japan and summarize meaningful common phenomena in the three datasets: the annual landfall frequency of tropical cyclones over mainland China in the Chinese dataset is 1 more than in the other two datasets on average. Since 1970, the landfall frequency in the three datasets has shown little change, whereas the landfall latitude has shown a relatively consistent northward movement (prior to 1970, the three datasets showed different trends in frequency and latitude). The landfall frequency data, assigned to different latitude bins, show that the most tropical cyclones made landfall below 30N and that landfall frequency decreased with latitude increasing. An anomalously large (small) number of tropical cyclones made landfall over the latitude zone of 21N-23N (23N-24N and 20 N-21N).