Abstract
Paleoclimate records provide a critical long-term perspective on natural climate variability, essential for understanding contemporary climate variations. However, existing paleoclimate proxies lack sufficient spatial-temporal coverage for studying high-impact weather extremes like tropical cyclones (TCs). Here we introduce a multi-source framework that contextualizes the contemporary TC landfalls in East Asia against a multi-century baseline (1368–1911) reconstructed from historical documents. Leveraging pre-industrial and contemporary-era data, the analysis reveals that the relatively small shift toward earlier landfalls in the contemporary era (1946–2020) falls well within the range of fluctuations documented historically (1651–1900). Rather than indicating detectable anthropogenic changes, these results suggest the dominance of natural variability in modulating landfall timing. Our work also suggests consistent natural controls of TC timing in contemporary and pre-industrial eras. This consistency lends credibility to pre-industrial observational datasets and climate simulations, providing a robust template for assessing changes in the seasonality of high-impact extremes.
Data availability
The REACHES, IBTrACS, and ModE-RA datasets are archived by NCEI/NOAA. The archived data links are as follows: the REACHES (https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/access/metadata/landing-page/bin/iso?id=noaa-historical-23410), the IBTrACS (https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/products/international-best-track-archive), and the ModE-RA (https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/access/paleo-search/study/38239). NOAA/CIRES/DOE 20th Century Reanalysis (V3) data are provided by the NOAA PSL, Boulder, Colorado, USA, from their website at https://psl.noaa.gov. The CESM-HR data used in this work are available from https://ihesp.github.io/archive/products/ihesp-products/data-release/DataRelease_Phase2.html.
Code availability
The code used to generate the plots will be accessible via a Zenodo repository before publication https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18568571.
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Acknowledgements
G.Z. thanks Dr. Gregory Hakim for suggestions on the paleoclimate reanalysis and Drs. Renzhi Jing and Jie Chen for stimulating suggestions. The authors thank Dr. Kevin Hodges for providing the TC track data from the 20th Century Reanalysis (20CRv3). The research is supported by the U.S. National Science Foundation award AGS-2327959 and the faculty development fund of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. D.F. acknowledges the funding supports from the U.S. National Science Foundation award AGS-2231237 and AGS-2332469. K.L. acknowledges the funding support from the Science and Technology Council of Taiwan NSTC 112-2122-M-001-001. J.F. is funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation grant number 219746.
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G.Z. conceived the study and conducted the analyses. G.Z. drafted the manuscript with the input of all the authors. D.F., J.F., and K.L. contributed to the analyses and interpretation of CESM simulations, ModE-RA data, and REACHES records, respectively. K.L. and W.T. contributed to the compilation and interpretation of REACHES records. T.K. and G.Z. developed the statistical analyses.
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Zhang, G., Lin, K.E., Fu, D. et al. Contextualizing contemporary seasonality variations in East Asian tropical cyclone landfalls with a multi-century historical baseline. npj Clim Atmos Sci (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41612-026-01354-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41612-026-01354-3
