Increase in the violence of Atlantic hurricanes by heating the oceans

"We humans leave our traces everywhere, including these hurricanes," says Daniel Gilford, the main author of the study and climate scientist at Climate Central, a non -profit research organization in Princeton, New Jersey, who created the accompanying report. "If we can increase the temperatures of the sea surface, then we can also increase the speed at which a hurricane turns."

The study is expanding a growing collection of research that shows that global warming reinforces hurricanes. Due to global warming, increasing seas also intensify hurricanes, as research has shown. In addition, the storms strike in the season and bring more precipitation than previous hurricanes.

devastating consequences

The hurricane season in the Atlantic was devastating this year. For example, hurricane Helene, who moved through the southeastern USA in August, brought almost 80 centimeters of rain in some places. The storm called for more than 200 lives and caused damage of up to $ 250 billion-a sum that Helene would catapult the most expensive hurricane in the USA in front of the 2005 hurricane.

in Asheville, North Carolina, the most affected US city of Helene, areas were "completely devastated and torn away", "reports a tropical meteorologist from the North Carolina State University in Asheville. The region "experienced more wind damage when I expected a hurricane in this deep location in Germany," he adds, explaining that the wind kinked trees and power lines and interrupted communication with the city for several days. According to the report by Climate Central, the wind speeds of Helene, which was at its peak at 225 kilometers per hour, were about 26 kilometers per hour than they would have been on the Atlantic without the warming effect.

floods damaged the main water pipe of the National Centers for Environmental Information, a branch of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) in the city center of Asheville, which archived global weather and climate data. This interrupted the cooling of the center's supercomputers, reports. "In the days after the storm, they actually drove a fire engine to one of the local lakes" and pumped lake water to fill the cooling system. Some computers overheated and must be replaced, and the event delayed the report by Climate Central, which was dependent on data from the center. However, data was not lost, the papers stayed dry and the center is ready for operation again, he says.

dangerous waters

hurricanes are driven by warm ocean water. Theoretically, the warmer the water, the greater the intensity of the hurricane, which is measured by the wind speed. Climate change has provided plenty of fuel: the surface temperatures of the sea have increased by about 1 ° C in the North Atlantic since 1900.

In order to clarify the influence of climate change on the intensity of the youngest hurricanes in this region, Gilford and his co -authors simulated how all 49 hurricanes who met North Atlantic between 2019 and 2024 would have developed if climate change had not warmed up the ocean. Then the scientists compared the wind speeds of the simulated storms with those of the actual storms.

climate change reinforced 30 of the hurricanes so much that they could be classified a category higher on the Saffir Simpson scale than they would have been without climate change. Climate change has probably shared five storms-Lorenzo (2019), Ian (2022), Lee (2023), Milton (2024) and Beryl (2024)-for the past five years to Category 5-Hurricanes described by NOAA as "catastrophic".

"The study does an excellent job to quantify the changes we have observed," says Ryan Truchelut, co-founder and chief meteorologist of Weather Tiger, a weather and climate forecast company in Tallahasee, Florida. He emphasizes that the authors of the study used the best available data and suitable statistical methods to try to determine whether a hurricane was affected by climate change.

fright considers the study necessary, but criticizes that the specification of a single increase in wind speed for every storm, as the authors did, instead of specifying a value range with error limits, is "too easy". The model of the study does not take into account all real complexities of the ocean conditions and storm behavior that create uncertainties, he says.

"Climate change is there," explains Gilford. "We urgently need to have more discussions about reducing our greenhouse gas emissions."