Tibetan Plateau uplift drove half of simulated rise in Pacific cyclone frequency

Nearly one-third of the world's tropical cyclones form over the western North Pacific, threatening Southeast and East Asia. A modeling study published in Nature Communications finds that the rise of the Tibetan Plateau was a key driver in shaping how often these storms formed across the Cenozoic era, accounting for nearly half of the simulated increase in cyclone frequency between the early Eocene and the present day. The climate modeling research, led by Tingyu Zhang and Tianjun Zhou, reports that Tibetan Plateau uplift, from early Eocene elevations to modern heights, explains close to 50 percent of the simulated rise in tropical cyclone frequency over the western North Pacific.

The simulations held the present-day land-sea configuration and sea surface temperatures prescribed and fixed, isolating the effect of the plateau's growing elevation. The researchers traced the mechanism to large-scale atmospheric dynamics. As the plateau rose, it generated an eastward-propagating Rossby wave train, a train of planetary-scale waves in the atmosphere.

This wave train strengthened the western North Pacific subtropical high, a semi-permanent high-pressure system, which in turn intensified the monsoon trough that stretches across the basin. The simulations showed an amplified supply of moisture feeding into the monsoon trough, together with reinforced upward motion of air. The study reports that these two changes collectively favor the genesis and intensification of tropical cyclones.

Tropical cyclone genesis over the western North Pacific shifted substantially during the Cenozoic, the era spanning roughly the last 66 million years, but the mechanisms behind those shifts had remained unclear. The new results indicate that the topographic evolution of High Mountain Asia played a pivotal role in that long-term history, as represented in the model. The study is a model-based reconstruction, so its conclusions depend on simulated climate states rather than direct storm observations, which do not exist for the deep past.

Because the authors prescribed modern sea surface temperatures and geography to separate the plateau's contribution, other Cenozoic factors, such as changing ocean temperatures, were not part of the uplift signal they quantified. Nevertheless, the work underscores how the growth of the world's highest plateau left a measurable imprint, in simulations, on one of the planet's most active tropical cyclone basins, tying the geological history of Asia's mountains to the storm hazards that affect coastal communities across East and Southeast Asia.

Subject of Research: Cenozoic Tibetan Plateau uplift and western North Pacific tropical cyclone frequency in model simulations

Article Title: Tibetan Plateau uplift increased western North Pacific tropical cyclone frequency

Article References: Zhang, T., Zhou, T., He, L., Guo, Z., Ren, Z., & Jiang, J. (2026). Tibetan Plateau uplift increased western North Pacific tropical cyclone frequency. Nature Communications. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-026-78480-2

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1038/s41467-026-78480-2

Keywords: Tibetan Plateau, tropical cyclones, western North Pacific, Cenozoic, paleoclimate, monsoon trough, subtropical high, Rossby wave, climate modeling, High Mountain Asia, Tibetan, Plateau