![]() ![]() If you switch from a Volkswagen to a Ferrari, you'll have much faster acceleration and a higher top speed." "If you keep it there, it will go up to the top speed it can go. "If you want your car to accelerate fast, you put your pedal to the metal," Emanuel says. And late summer temperatures in the Gulf of Mexico now average more than 2 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than they did 30 years ago, says Andreas Prein, with the National Center for Atmospheric Research. But it also is shortening the time it takes to reach those speeds. Scientists have known for decades that the peak intensity of severe storms will likely increase as temperatures rise. By late in this century, they could come every five to 10 years. The result: A storm that increases its intensity by 60 knots in the 24 hours before landfall may have been likely to occur once a century in the 1900s. "Water evaporates faster from a hot surface than a cold surface."Įmanuel analyzed the evolution of 6,000 simulated storms, comparing how they evolved under historical conditions of the 20th century, with how they could evolve at the end of the 21st century if greenhouse gas emissions keep rising. "Hurricanes are powered by the evaporation of sea water," Emanuel says. While that's not unheard of, the potential for wind speeds to rise rapidly increases under warmer conditions, says Kerry Emanuel, an atmospheric sciences professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who published groundbreaking research earlier this year on the potential for changes in hurricane wind speeds. Harvey's wind speeds, on the other hand, intensified by about 45 miles per hour in the last 24 hours before landfall, according to National Hurricane Center data. Hurricanes tend to weaken as they approach land because they are losing access to the hot, wet ocean air that gives the storms their energy. Photograph by Marcus Yam, Los Angeles Times, Getty Images What’s Behind the Intensity? Here's how scientists explained what brought those ingredients together.īoat rescue traffic on the flooded Jimmy Johnson Road in Port Arthur, Texas, on August 30. The storm intensified rapidly, it stalled out over one area, and it is dumped record rains for days and days. ![]() In the case of Harvey, which dumped rivers of rain in and around Houston and threatened millions of people with catastrophic flooding ( see photos), at least three troubling factors converged. "When you add in the climate's natural variability and then the right conditions come along, you can get a storm which is stronger than you might otherwise have expected." "In general, the way to think about it is: climate change has changed the environment that everything is happening in," says Kevin Trenberth, a senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Colorado. Hurricane Harvey's deadly cocktail of wind and moisture hit America's fourth-largest city with a ferocity that Texas has never seen.Īnd while scientists maintain that no single weather event can be attributed to climate change, two centuries of human fossil-fuel burning has altered temperatures just enough to almost certainly make this particular storm worse. Between Hurricanes Harvey, Irma, and Maria, plus Jose, thousands of structures have been destroyed and many people have been killed, injured, or displaced. The 2017 Atlantic hurricane season has been extremely active, and deadly. ![]()
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