Abstract
Tropical cyclone (TC) stalling refers to a storm wandering within a relatively small region. When TC stalling occurs, localized accumulated damage can increase substantially. However, the understanding of this special behavior globally, especially its response to climate warming, remains limited. Here, we provide a comprehensive global analysis of TC stalling and its response to climate warming, utilizing both observational data and climate model simulations. Our results reveal a distinct hemispheric asymmetry, showing that basins in the Southern Hemisphere are more prone to TC stalling than those in the Northern Hemisphere. Although a warming climate reduces the global probability of TC stalling occurrence, it significantly increases the daily rainfall by these storms, particularly over land and nearshore regions. Our analysis also indicates that, although the main drivers for the stalling vary in different basins, in general, they are mainly influenced by the steering wind vector (magnitude and direction) and TC location. Furthermore, changes in probability of TC stalling in climate warming are mainly affected by changes in the probability of TC exposure to a weak steering flow.
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Data availability
The IBTrACS v04 dataset is available from National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/ibtracs. The MSWEP dataset is available from GloH2O, https://www.gloh2o.org/mswep/. All other data used in this study are available in the Zenodo database, https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18954765).
Code availability
The model source code is available from https://www.gfdl.noaa.gov/atmospheric-model/. Codes used in this study are available in the Zenodo database, https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18954765). Details about the code and technology of XGBoost are available from https://xgboost.readthedocs.io/en/stable/index.html.
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Acknowledgements
The research is financially supported by China Postdoctoral Science Foundation (2025M783187), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (52539005, 52379010), the Natural Science Foundation of Guangdong Province (2023B1515020087), and China Scholarship Council. The simulations presented in this study were performed on computational resources managed and supported by Princeton Research Computing, a consortium of groups including the Princeton Institute for Computational Science and Engineering and the Office of Information Technology’s High Performance Computing Center and Visualization Laboratory at Princeton University.
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Z.D. conceived the study with input from G.V. Z.D. designed the study, performed the analysis, processed the data, prepared figures and tables, and drafted the paper. G.V. designed the study and contributed to the review and editing of the paper. G.A.V. and W.Y. developed the climate models, provided climate model data, and contributed to the review and editing of the paper. Z.W. performed the analysis, contributed to the review and editing of the paper, and acquired funding for this research work.
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Deng, Z., Villarini, G., Yang, W. et al. Global stalled tropical cyclones in a changing climate. Nat Commun (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-026-71320-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-026-71320-3
