Abstract: Understanding the statistical trends of tropical cyclone movement is of great significance to revealing its mechanism and improving forecast accuracy. We examine certain trends of drift acceleration of tropical cyclones using the data observed for tracking the histories of 4907 cyclone events during 1979-2016, published by Joint Typhoon Warning Center (JTWC) and the National Hurricane Center (NHC). We found that tropical cyclones have a mean zonal acceleration close to 0 at low latitudes, while at high latitudes they tend to accelerate towards the east with an increasing mean zonal acceleration. And similar trends can be observed in the northern and southern hemispheres. Along the meridian, however, the acceleration trends vary across different basins, and the difference becomes more noticeable at higher latitudes.

Key words: tropical cyclone motion, drift acceleration, statistical trend, latitude effect