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Fueled by unusually warm waters, Hurricane Melissa this week became one of the most powerful Atlantic storms on record. Now a new Adticlition study shows that human-made climate change is making tropical storms worse.
Hurricane Melissa slammed into Jamaica on Tuesday, wreaking havoc across the island before tearing through Haiti and Cuba. The storm, a Category 5 storm with the strongest winds, has killed at least 40 people in the Caribbean so far. Now weakened to a category 2, it continues its path to Bermuda, where landfall is possible Thursday night, according to the National Hurricane Center.
Early reports of damage are cataclysmic, especially in Western Jamaica. Winds reaching speeds of 185 miles per hour and moderate rainfall in all areas, brought down large areas of agricultural land and displaced more than 25,000 people – locals and tourists alike. According to a new Atiation study from Imperial College London, climate change has increased Melissa’s wind by 7 percent, increasing the damage by 12 percent.
Losses could add up to tens of billions of dollars, experts say.
The findings of the same reports released earlier this week are how global warming has had a positive effect on the severity of Hurricane Melissa. Each analysis adds to a growing body of research showing how warming oceans and climate change are increasing the conditions needed for strong tropical storms.
Hurricane Melissa is “kind of textbook for how we expect hurricanes to respond to warmer weather,” said Brian Soden, a professor of atmospheric science at the University of Miami, who was not involved in the latest Miami analysis. “We know that ocean temperatures are warmer [are] driven almost exclusively by increasing greenhouse gases. “
The storm disrupted all aspects of life in this part of the Caribbean.
“There has been a huge overcrowding of services. We have people living in shelters all over the country,” Dennis Zulu, the United Nations Residence Coordinator in Jamaica, said at a news conference on Wednesday. “What we see in the first test is a world that has been destroyed to a level never seen before.”
Weather communication
For rapid research, researchers at Imperial College used the Imperial College’s Imperial College Storm, known as IRIS, which created a database of millions of artificial cyclone tracks that will help fill in the gaps of the real world.
The model essentially runs the probability of lightning for a given storm – usually the most damaging feature – in a pre-industrial climate that follows the current climate. Applying Iris to Hurricane Melissa is how the researchers determined that human-caused warming accounted for the cyclone’s wind speed by 7 percent.
