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Global warming may help make hurricanes stronger, study finds
Aug. 1, 2005
Courtesy Nature
and World Science staff
Global warming may be contributing to making hurricanes stronger, a new study has found.
The storms have been getting more destructive over the past three decades, according to the study, by Kerry Emanuel of the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge,
Mass.
Emanuel warns that global warming might increase the effect of hurricanes further still in the coming years.
The findings appeared yesterday in the research journal Nature online.
Previous studies have looked at the effects of rising global average temperatures on tropical cyclones,
commonly called hurricanes or typhoons. But these past studies have tended to focus on whether
the events have become more frequent.
No such trends have been clearly observed, according to Emanuel. But he looked instead at the question of whether cyclones have got more intense,
that is, whether they hit harder and last longer.
Theories and computer simulations of climate indicate that warming should indeed generate an increase in storm intensity, he
asserted.
Emanuel analysed records of tropical cyclones since the middle of the last century, and
found that the amount of energy released in these events in both the North Atlantic and the North Pacific oceans increased markedly since the mid-1970s.
Both the duration of the cyclones and the largest wind speeds they produced have increased by about
half over the past 50 years, he found.
Emanuel also determined that these increases in storm intensity are mirrored by increases in the average temperature at the surface of the tropical oceans, suggesting that this warming—some of which can be ascribed to global warming—is responsible for the greater power of the cyclones.
He pointed out that as the human population in coastal regions gets ever denser, the damage and casualties produced by more intense storms could increase considerably in the future.
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Front image courtesy U.S.
National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration
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