A powerful storm swept into Georgia after hitting the Florida coast
More Storms Are Stretched Thick by a Series of Disasters as the Earth Warms: A Problem That Can Be Helped
As Earth’s climate warms, more storms are intensifying quickly, growing from relatively weak tropical storms to Category 3 or higher hurricanes in under 24 hours, sometimes stunning forecasters and giving residents little time to prepare.
There are 5. More volatility. Researchers say that storms will intensify more rapidly as the climate warms. They are still unsure about why it is happening, but the trend appears to be clear.
There is a “migration of tropical cyclones out of the tropics and toward subtropics and middle latitudes,” Dr. Kossin said. That could mean more storms making landfall in higher latitudes, like in the United States and Japan.
Slower, wetter storms also worsen flooding. Dr. Kossin likened the problem to walking around your back yard while using a hose to spray water on the ground. If you walk fast, the water won’t have a chance to start pooling. But if you walk slowly, he said, “you’ll get a lot of rain below you.”
In a 2018 paper, Dr. Kossin wrote that hurricanes over the United States had slowed 17 percent since 1947. He said storms are causing an increase in local precipitation in the United States.
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Slower storms. Researchers do not yet know why storms are moving more slowly, but they are. Some say a slowdown in global atmospheric circulation, or global winds, could be partly to blame.
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There is more rain. Warming also increases the amount of water vapor that the atmosphere can hold. In fact, every degree Celsius of warming allows the air to hold about 7 percent more water.
Source: Powerful Storm Sweeps Into Georgia After Pelting Florida Coast
Rapid Intense Winds in a Tropical Hurricane: When Did Climate Change Induced Its First Deaths? Dr. Kerry Emanuel
Rapid intensification technically refers to an increase of at least 30 knots, or 35 m.p.h., in the maximum sustained winds over a 24-hour period, according to the National Hurricane Center. Since the 1980s, the likelihood of a Hurricane having rapid intensification has gone from one to five percent.
“Potential intensity is going up,” said Kerry Emanuel, a professor of atmospheric science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “We predicted it would go up 30 years ago, and the observations show it going up.”
“It’s very likely that human-caused climate change contributed to that anomalously warm ocean,” said James P. Kossin, a climate scientist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. “Climate change is making it more likely for hurricanes to behave in certain ways.”
“It’s a forecaster’s nightmare,” Dr. Emanuel said. He said there’s no time to evacuate people if a storm becomes a Category 4 hurricane overnight.
The window of time to make a decision gets smaller, Dr. Emanuel said. For example, if officials, working with forecasters, issue an evacuation order too early, then they risk unnecessarily sending hundreds of thousands, and sometimes millions, scrambling, jamming highways and snarling transit systems. Staying in place could be more costly and dangerous in some cases.
The impact of Hurricane Idalia on the South Florida coastline: High-speed winds, storms, and outage warnings in Tallahassee
Hurricane Idalia intensified overnight and is now a Category 4 storm heading toward Florida’s Gulf Coast. The National Hurricane Center said it has wind speeds of 130 miles an hour and is expected to make landfall at 8 a.m Eastern, bringing catastrophic waves and possibly submerging the coast in up to 16 feet of flooding. You can track the storm’s path here.
The big bend of the state’s peninsula will be the strongest part of the storm. Though that region is sparsely populated, the storm is expected to affect much of the southeastern United States: Officials issued evacuation orders in counties across West and Central Florida, and governors in Georgia and the Carolinas declared states of emergency because of concerns about heavy rains and potential tornadoes.
More than 50,000 people in Florida are without power. Tallahassee is preparing for outages that could last days, expecting its strongest storm in decades.
The Florida National Guard is fully mobilized, with more than 55,000 soldiers and airmen either deployed or deploying, and help is coming from as far away as California.
Communities along hundreds of miles of coastline emptied the shelves of their grocery stores as a precautionary measure. Many people have fled Cedar Key, an island city that is home to roughly 700 people. “My family has been here for many generations,” said the mayor, Heath Davis. We haven’t seen a storm like this before.
More storms are intensifying rapidly, growing from relatively weak tropical storms to Category 3 or higher hurricanes in less than 24 hours, sometimes stunning forecasters and giving residents little time to prepare. Researchers said that storms will intensify more rapidly as Earth’s climate warms. “It’s very likely that human-caused climate change contributed to that anomalously warm ocean,” a researcher said.