古风暴学是始于20世纪90年代的一门新兴学科,通过研究风暴活动的地质记录和历史文献资料,恢复器测之前几百年至数千年前的热带气旋活动规律。经过十几年的发展,逐渐形成一套包括研究领域、方法、技术与手段等比较完整的理论体系,成为第四纪古气候研究和过去全球变化的重要组成部分。古风暴学研究的替代指标包括:文字记载、特征的风暴事件沉积、海相化石组合、同位素地球化学组成等。这些指标单独使用时都有一定局限性。寻找新的替代指标,并运用多种指标综合分析方法提高古风暴事件的分辨率和可信度,是今后该学科发展的重要方向。已有的研究多侧重于古风暴频数的研究,今后应充分利用现代风暴潮理论的新进展,通过数值模拟与替代指标研究相结合,更准确地恢复古风暴强度。同时,应加强古风暴活动的全球对比研究,以揭示风暴活动与全球气候变化的关系,为在全球不断变暖背景下台风活动的情景预测提供依据。
Paleotempestology is an emerging field of science that, mainly through the use of geological and documentary proxy techniques, studies past tropical cyclone activity beyond the period of instrumental observations, typically spanning the last several centuries to five millennia. In the past more than 10 years, significant progresses have been achieved in research scope, theory and methods. Paleotempestology has become an important component of Quaternary Palaeoclimatology. The proxies for paleotempestology studies include historical documentary records, typical storm-generated sedimentary structures, marine fossil assemblages, isotopic geochemical composition. Single proxy technique for storm-genesis interpretation has some limitation. A promising research direction in paleotempestology involves the development of new proxies and multi-proxy techniques in detecting the geophysical and ecological impacts of past typhoons. Instead of highlighting typhoon landfall frequency, in future, we should take advantage of recent advances in storm surge theoretic studies, integrating storm surge modeling with proxy studies to help validate the intensity estimates. Meanwhile, enhancing global correlation studies of tropical cyclones activity is another promising field to improve our understanding the linkage between tropical cyclones activity and global climate change, providing evidence for constructing typhoon activity scenarios under global warming.