Jeonbuk National University (JBNU) Research Professor Han‑Kyung Kim (Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences, Climate Modeling Laboratory; Professor Jong‑Yeon Park's research team) announced on the 16th that a study analyzing, using climate models, the impact of marine ecosystems on future Western North Pacific tropical cyclones has been published online in the latest issue of Nature Climate Change (IF 30.7, JIF ranking No. 1), the world’s leading journal in meteorology and atmospheric sciences.

The title of the published paper is “Western North Pacific Tropical Cyclone Activity Modulated by Phytoplankton Feedback Under Global Warming.” 

Climate researchers who study large-scale systems such as the climate system use climate models—human‑made representations of the Earth—to test various theories and make future projections on supercomputers. A climate model mathematically represents the physical laws that govern the roles and interactions of the various components of the Earth system, such as the atmosphere, ocean, and land. It is a numerically coded Earth written in programming language. 

In this study, Professor Kim showed through experiments using climate models that, under future global warming scenarios, an increase in phytoplankton in the equatorial eastern Pacific induces La Niña–like sea surface temperature changes. These changes lead to an increased frequency of tropical cyclone genesis in the southeastern part of the Western North Pacific, which may result in a higher frequency of tropical cyclone landfalls in East Asia, including Korea. The study demonstrates that future changes in the marine ecological environment driven by climate change can affect extreme weather events such as typhoons.

Research Professor Han‑Kyung Kim said, “Tropical cyclone activity in a future climate with accelerated global warming shows considerable uncertainty. Ocean biogeochemical variables may be factors that cause such uncertainty. We plan to expand our research to quantify and reduce the uncertainties in climate‑model projections of tropical cyclone changes, and to investigate how future tropical cyclone activity in ocean basins other than the Western North Pacific is modulated by biogeochemical variables.” 

Meanwhile, this research was conducted as a basic research project funded by the government (Ministry of Education) and supported by the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF) (2021R1I1A1A01040364 and RS-2023000207866).