Climate change infographic hurricanes11/11/2023 ![]() ![]() Hurricane Idalia rapidly intensified by 55 mph in 24 hours before landfall along Florida’s Big Bend as a Category 4 hurricane late last month.Īnd in the North Atlantic, where ocean temperatures have been off the charts, storms like Lee have had quite a feast. Rapid intensification has been happening more and more as storms are approaching landfall, making them harder to prepare for. What rapid intensification means for hurricanes Hurricane Dorian lashed the Carolinas with driving rain and fierce winds as it neared the US east coast Thursday after devastating the Bahamas and killing at least 20 people. “The short of it is, as the sea surface temperatures warm, because of human-induced greenhouse gas emissions, the likelihood that any event will undergo rapid intensification will increase,” Reed said.Īn aerial view of damage from Hurricane Dorian on September 5, 2019, in Marsh Harbour, Great Abaco Island in the Bahamas. More than 90% of warming around the globe over the past 50 years has taken place in the oceans, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. ![]() ![]() It’s just one of the ways experts say the climate crisis is making hurricanes more dangerous, as warmer waters allow for storms to strengthen quicker and reach higher categories on the hurricane wind speed scale. ![]() The primary way in which storms reach Category 4 or 5 strength is by undergoing a rapid intensification process - when a storm’s winds strengthen rapidly by at least 35 mph in 24 hours or less, said Reed. “It is very likely that there are more Category 5 storms now than there were 40 years ago,” Kossin told CNN. Still, he said at the breakneck pace at which the oceans are warming, high intensity tropical cyclones are likely occurring more often. He cautions the NOAA database had not fully counted storms prior to the satellite era, and while advances in technology have made it easier to measure hurricanes, it is still difficult to determine the real trend. Jim Kossin, a hurricane expert at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the Brooklyn-based nonprofit First Street Foundation, agrees. Planet-warming pollution made summer heat twice as likely for nearly all of humanity “The increase in Category 4 or 5 storms, especially that we’ve seen over the last couple years due to the increase in rapid intensification, is a telltale sign of climate change, which is exactly what we expect to see in a warmer world,” Kevin Reed, a hurricane expert and professor at Stony Brook University’s school of marine and atmospheric sciences, told CNN.Ī World Youth Day volunteer uses a small fan to cool off from the intense heat, as he waits ahead of the Pope Francis arrival at Passeio Marítimo in Algés, just outside Lisbon, Aug. This year alone, Category 5 storms have already appeared in all seven ocean basins where tropical cyclones form, including Hurricane Jova, which also rapidly strengthened into a Category 5 storm earlier this week. Lee is now the eighth Category 5 storm in the North Atlantic since 2016, which means 20% of Category 5 hurricanes on record in the basin have occurred in the last seven years, a CNN analysis of NOAA’s hurricane database shows. Hurricane Lee rapidly intensified at a historic pace into a Category 5 storm Thursday night, adding to a spate of extremely intense hurricanes this year and in recent decades which experts say is a symptom of the climate crisis. ![]()
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