Landfalling Typhoons Have Become More Intense

http://www.climatecentral.org/news/landfalling-typhoons-have-become-more-intense-20663

By Andrea Thompson
Sept. 5,2016

In the Northwest Pacific, already a hotspot for tropical cyclones, the storms that strike East and Southeast Asia have been intensifying more than those that stay out at sea over the last four decades, a new study finds.

The proportion of landfalling storms that reach Category 4 or 5 strength — the storms that wreak the most damage, as recent examples like 2013’s devastating Super Typhoon Haiyan show — has doubled and even tripled in some areas of the basin, researchers found. The increases seem to be the result of faster intensification linked to warmer ocean waters in coastal areas.

In the Northwest Pacific, already a hotspot for tropical cyclones, the storms that strike East and Southeast Asia have been intensifying more than those that stay out at sea over the last four decades, a new study finds.

The proportion of landfalling storms that reach Category 4 or 5 strength — the storms that wreak the most damage, as recent examples like 2013’s devastating Super Typhoon Haiyan show — has doubled and even tripled in some areas of the basin, researchers found. The increases seem to be the result of faster intensification linked to warmer ocean waters in coastal areas.

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Digging further into the possible causes for the trends they saw, the researchers linked the faster intensification rates of landfalling typhoons to higher ocean temperatures in coastal areas. Those warmer waters were ratcheting up the potential intensity of storms, or the theoretical maximum intensity they could achieve given the particular ocean temperatures and atmospheric environment. (Other factors, such as dry air or wind shear, often keep storms from reaching that potential maximum.)

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