Studies show that climate change has made Hurricane Melissa 4 times more likely
This is the original story It appeared on Inside Climate News and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
Fueled by unusually warm waters, Hurricane Melissa has become one of the strongest Atlantic hurricanes on record this week. Now a new rapid attribution study shows that human-induced climate change has quadrupled the likelihood of deadly tropical cyclones.
Hurricane Melissa slammed into Jamaica on Tuesday, wreaking havoc across the island before hitting Haiti and Cuba. The storm, which reached Category 5 and is reserved for storms with the strongest winds, has so far killed at least 40 people across the Caribbean. It has now weakened to a Category 2 and is continuing its path toward Bermuda, where landfall is expected Thursday night, according to the National Hurricane Center.
Early reports of damage, especially in the worst-hit western Jamaica, are dire. Winds of 185 mph and torrential rain flattened entire neighborhoods, obliterated large swaths of farmland and forced more than 25,000 people — locals and tourists — to seek cover in shelters or hotel ballrooms. According to a new commissioned study from Imperial College London, climate change increased Melissa’s wind speed by 7%, causing a 12% increase in damage.
Experts say that the losses can reach tens of billions of dollars.
The findings echo similar reports released earlier this week about how global warming may have contributed to the likelihood and intensity of Hurricane Melissa. Each of these analyzes adds to a growing body of research showing how ocean warming from climate change is creating the conditions for stronger tropical storms.
Hurricane Melissa is “a textbook example of how we expect hurricanes to respond to climate warming,” said Brian Soden, a professor of atmospheric science at the University of Miami who was not involved in the recent analysis. We know that ocean temperatures are warming [are] It is almost exclusively driven by increased greenhouse gases.
The storm has disrupted all aspects of life in this part of the Caribbean.
“There has been a massive displacement of services. We have people all over the country in shelters,” Denise Zulu, the UN resident coordinator in Jamaica, told a press conference on Wednesday. What we see in early assessments is a country devastated to a degree never before seen.
Weather communication
To study rapid attribution, Imperial College researchers used the Imperial College Hurricane Model, known as IRIS, which has created a database of millions of synthetic tropical storm tracks that can help fill in the gaps about how hurricanes behave in the real world.
The model essentially runs simulations of the probability of a given storm’s wind speed — often the most destructive factor — in a pre-industrial climate versus the current climate. Applying IRIS to Hurricane Melissa, researchers determined that human-caused warming increased the storm’s wind speed by 7 percent.
