Hurricanes are getting faster and more dangerous due to climate change – with wind speeds of over 115mph 15 per cent more likely than 40 years ago
- Researchers examined 40 years of hurricane and climate data for their study
- They found the maximum sustained wind speed was up 8 per cent per decade
- The team say the probability of a hurricane having wind speeds of at least 100 knots increased by approximately 15 pet cent in the past 39 years
Hurricanes are getting stronger and faster in almost every region of the world where they form, and it is being caused by climate change, researchers claim.
Scientists for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration have been analysing 40 years of data and say the warming planet is fuelling the change.
They found that the risk of a hurricane wind speed reaching above 115mph – that is at least category 3 – had increased by 15 per cent over the past four decades.
This means hurricanes reaching over 115mph, like Hurricane Katrina that destroyed large parts of Louisianna in 2005, are 15 per cent more likely than in the 1980s.
Hurricanes are getting stronger and faster in almost every region of the world where they form, and it is being caused by climate change, researchers claim
Study authors say over the past 40 years climate change has seen sea surface temperatures warm up in hurricane prone regions.
When you add this to changes in atmospheric conditions it increases the intensity of the hurricanes in these regions, the authors wrote in the paper.
They say the this change in intensity and speed increase is expected to continue and become more substantial as the planet warms up further over the next few years.
The latest study builds on work by lead author James Kossin from 2013 that suggested hurricanes were becoming more intense year-on-year.
However, that timespan from the earlier study covered 28 years and gave a less conclusive result than this new work.
To increase confidence in the results, the researchers extended the study to include global hurricane data from 1979 to 2017.
Using analytical techniques including looking at infrared temperature measurements from satellites, Kossin and his colleagues were able to create a more uniform data set with which to identify trends.
‘The main hurdle we have for finding trends is that the data are collected using the best technology at the time,’ said Kossin.
‘Every year the data are a bit different than last year, each new satellite has new tools and captures data in different ways, so in the end we have a patchwork quilt of all the satellite data that have been woven together.’
Prof Kossin’s previous research has shown other changes in hurricane behaviour over the decades, such as where they travel and how fast they move.
In 2014, he discovered hurricane were migrating towards the poles, where tropical cyclones are travelling farther north and south.
This was exposing previously less-affected coastal populations to greater risk.
They found that the maximum sustained wind speed of hurricanes are increasing by about 8 per cent per decade on both a global and a regional level.
In 2018, he demonstrated that hurricanes are moving more slowly across land due to changes in Earth’s climate which resulted in greater flood risks.
This was caused as storms hover over cities and other areas for longer than before.
‘Our results show that these storms have become stronger on global and regional levels, which is consistent with expectations of how hurricanes respond to a warming world,’ said Kossin.
‘It’s a good step forward and increases our confidence that global warming has made hurricanes stronger, but our results don’t tell us precisely how much of the trends are caused by human activities and how much may be just natural variability.’
The study only focused on major hurricanes – that is those reaching over 115mph – also known as category three hurricanes.
The paper was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.