Deadly Hurricanes Over 185 Kmph Are Increasing Due To Climate Change, Study Claims

Today, cyclones and hurricanes are getting stronger and faster than they used to be. Look at cyclone Amphan in the Bay of Bengal, ready to wreak havoc for people in West Bengal and Odisha.

It¡¯s travelling at a speed ranging from 200kmph to 265kmph. And researchers claim climate change is to be blamed for such dangerous intensity.

Reuters

This is according to the scientists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, who have been analysing 40 years worth of data looking at the warming patterns of our planet.

Their study (published in Proceedings of National Academy of Sciences) states that over the past 40 years, climate change has seen surface temperature warm-up in regions prone to hurricanes. Club this with changes to the atmospheric conditions, and they see an increase in the intensity of the hurricanes in these regions.

Researchers claim that this change in intensity and speed will continue and become more impactful if the planet temperature continues to rise.

40 years of data

This study strengthens work by lead author James Jossin from 2013 where he suggested that hurricanes were becoming more intense every year. However, that study only looked at 28 years, while giving a slightly less conclusive answer.

For the current study, scientists used analytical techniques to look at infrared temperature measurements from 1979 to 2017 using satellites and this helped scientists Kossin and his colleagues get more uniformed data.

Reuters

Kossin explains, ¡°The main hurdle we have for finding trends is that the data are collected using the best technology at the time. 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.¡±

Deadly hurricanes are 15 percent more likely

The study only focused on major hurricanes - that is those reaching over 185kmph -- also known as category three hurricanes, and they saw the frequency had increased by 15 per cent over the past four decades.

This basically means hurricanes like the Katrina which destroyed several parts of Louisiana, US, in 2005, are 15 per cent more likely than in the 1980s.

He stated, ¡°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.¡±

Reuters

He further added, ¡°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 maybe just natural variability.¡±