James Bruggers
Sep 7, 2019
Hurricane Dorian spun away from North Carolina's Outer Banks on Friday as one of the longest-lasting named storms and the most powerful on record to hit the Bahamas, and it wasn't finished yet—a hurricane warning had been posted for Nova Scotia, Canada.
It hit Canada as a category 2 hurricane.
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Dorian had struck the northern Bahamas' Great Abaco and Grand Bahama islands as one of the strongest Category 5 storms on record in the Atlantic, making landfall on Sept. 1 with 185 mile-per-hour winds and even higher gusts. It stalled there for more than 36 hours, its wind, rain and storm surge overwhelming the two low-lying islands and damaging or destroying more than 13,000 houses, nearly half the islands' dwellings, according to the American Red Cross.
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"What has happened in the Bahamas is like nothing I have ever seen in my career, and I have been doing this for more than 30 years," said Rob Young, a professor of geosciences and natural resources and director of the Western Carolina University Program for the Study of Developed Shorelines.
Stephen P. Leatherman, a professor in the Florida International University Department of Earth and Environment, and an expert on hurricanes, likened the destruction to a bombing. "The sheer devastation in the northern Bahamas is pretty much unprecedented," he said.
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Dorian's size, rainfall and stalling behavior reflected what scientists expect to see more of as the planet warms.
Global warming, fueled by increasing greenhouse gas concentrations from activities like burning fossil fuels, can exacerbate extreme weather, and it contributes to sea-level rise that then worsens the impact of storm surges. Warmer air also holds more moisture, so storms can dump more rain, particularly when they stall as Dorian did.
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Dorian was also among the longest-lasting named storms, Klotzbach said.
As of Friday evening, it had been a named storm for more than 13 days, nine of them as a hurricane.
"It's quite unusual for a hurricane to remain a hurricane for as many days as Dorian has," said climate scientist Michael Mann, a professor and director of the Earth System Science Center at Pennsylvania State University.
Mann said that can be attributed in part to a very warm Atlantic Ocean, and also to the path the storm took, which he described as a matter of chance. The result, he said, is that Dorian remained a "threat to human lives for days on end."
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