Jack Marley, UK Environment and Energy Editor
How hurricanes will change as the world warms {{^userSubscribed}} {{/userSubscribed}} {{^userSubscribed}} {{/userSubscribed}}
LONDON, When Hurricane Beryl struck the Grenadines on July 1, it became the fastest Category 5 storm ever recorded in the tropical Atlantic, with winds of 150 mph and a ferocious storm surge.
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The 2024 hurricane season has long been predicted to be an active one, but the speed at which Beryl intensified from a tropical storm with average winds of 70 mph to a major hurricane with winds of 130 mph in just 24 hours surprised scientists.
“Beryl is a storm that is more common in the middle of hurricane season than in June, and its rapid intensification and strength was likely driven by anomalously warm ocean waters,” said Brian Tang, associate professor of atmospheric sciences at the University at Albany, SUNY.
With fossil fuel emissions reaching record levels and the world warming rapidly, research suggests there are more nasty surprises to come.
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Sea surface temperatures are unusually high in a small area of ​​the mid-Atlantic where hurricanes originate. In fact, ocean heat content, a measure of the amount of energy in the surface waters that fuel hurricanes, was close to its September average on July 1.
Water accumulates heat slowly, so it’s alarming to see ocean temperatures approaching their usual peak at the start of summer. If the tropical Atlantic is already producing storms like these, what about the rest of the hurricane season?
A season of abundance
“If the National Hurricane Center’s early forecast, released on May 23, is correct, the North Atlantic could see 17 to 25 named storms, 8 to 13 hurricanes, and 4 to 7 major hurricanes by the end of November,” said Jordan Jones, a postdoctoral researcher at Purdue University who studies how climate change affects scientific efforts to forecast hurricanes.
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“This is the highest number of named storms ever reported in a preseason forecast.”
Ocean waters above 26 degrees are the lifeblood of hurricanes. Warm, moist air is also a prerequisite for hurricanes. But that’s not all these monsters need to reach the edge of their ferocity. Cyclonic storms also need steady winds in the upper and lower atmosphere to keep spinning.
A transition from El Niño to La Niña, two opposing phases in long-term temperature patterns in the Pacific Ocean, is expected later this summer, which could weaken the trade winds that can blow hurricane vortices apart.
“La Niña could signal an earlier start to the hurricane season and a longer season because, combined with a warm Atlantic Ocean, La Niña keeps hurricane-friendly conditions alive earlier and longer throughout the year.”
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You might expect a warming world to cause more hurricanes, but previous studies have shown that this isn’t the case, according to Ben Clark and Friederike Otto, two scientists trying to understand the role of climate change in extreme weather.
“In a rapidly warming world, there is an ample supply of warm, moist air and warm ocean temperatures, but there is no evidence that hurricanes are occurring more frequently, and scientists do not expect this to change with further climate change,” the researchers said.
Instead, the hurricanes that do form are more likely to be massive storms like Beryl. Hurricane-forming conditions will also be found further north and south of the equator as oceans warm rapidly everywhere. Atlantic hurricanes may also occur outside of the seasons people expect.
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“There is also evidence that hurricanes are moving slower and are increasingly likely to stall completely near the coast, concentrating rain in one place and causing more flooding. This is one reason why Hurricane Harvey was so destructive in Texas and Louisiana in 2017,” Clark and Otto say.
That summer, three deadly hurricanes slammed into the Atlantic Ocean in quick succession, giving little respite. These phenomena, which climate adaptation researcher Anita Kartik calls “storm clusters,” are a growing weather trend that is making hurricane-prone regions increasingly inhospitable.
Climate Colonialism
“When Hurricane Maria hit the eastern Caribbean island of Dominica in 2017, it caused devastation on a scale unimaginable for a large country,” said Emily Wilkinson, a climate resilience expert at the University of the West Indies.
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“The Category 5 hurricane damaged 98% of building roofs and caused $1.2 billion in damages. Dominica lost 226% of its GDP essentially overnight.”
Dominica has vowed to become the first country to become climate resilient and has begun rebuilding homes, bridges and other infrastructure. Protecting forests and coral reefs that buffer against rain, wind and waves has been a top priority, Wilkinson says. But in trying to build a sustainable future from the wreckage of Maria, Dominica has also had to contend with its European colonial past, a fate shared by many small island nations in the Caribbean and beyond.
“While most Caribbean islands have roughly the same exposure to hazards, our research shows that poverty and social inequality significantly amplify the severity of disasters,” say geography lecturers Levi Garman and Gabriel Tons, also from the University of the West Indies.
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Dominica was forced into a plantation economy by Britain, squandering the island’s productivity and sending its wealth overseas, Wilkinson said.
“But Dominica is home to the largest remaining indigenous community in the Caribbean, and the Kalinago people practice agriculture that combines crop diversification with planting methods that help stabilize slopes,” she added.
Climate-vulnerable countries can leverage these advantages to navigate an uncertain future, but the Caribbean experience shows that historical processes like colonialism continue to take lives in the present.
As the storm intensifies, the demand for “climate reparations” from the former colonial world by the wealthy countries that have contributed most to the climate problem will become more urgent.
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This article has been generated from an automated news agency feed without any modifications to the text.
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