Wednesday, November 18, 2020

In a Warming World, Hurricanes Weaken More Slowly After They Hit Land


https://insideclimatenews.org/news/13112020/hurricanes-climate-change-extreme-weather-climate-science

 

By Bob Berwyn, InsideClimate News   
Nov 15, 2020


Hurricanes are not just intensifying faster and dropping more rain. Because of global warming, their destructive power persists longer after reaching land, increasing risks to communities farther inland that may be unprepared for devastating winds and flooding.

That shift was underlined last  week by an analysis of Atlantic hurricanes that made landfall between 1967 and 2018. The study, published Nov. 11 in Nature, showed that, in the second half of the study period, hurricanes weakened almost twice as slowly after hitting land. "As the world continues to warm, the destructive power of hurricanes will extend progressively farther inland," the researchers wrote in their report.

Scientists have known for some time that, as global temperatures warm, hurricanes are intensifying, and are more likely to stall and produce rain.

But Pinaki Chakraborty, senior author of the study and a climate researcher with the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology, said the new analysis found that with warming, hurricanes also take longer to decay after landfall, something researchers had not studied before. "It was thought that a warming world has had no pronounced effect on landfalling hurricanes," Chakraborty said. "We show, not so, unfortunately."

Tropical storms and hurricanes are the costliest climate-linked natural disasters. Since 2000, the damage from such extreme storms has added up to $831 billion, about 60 percent of the total caused by climate-related extremes tracked by a federal disaster database.

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tags: extreme weather, severe weather,

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