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Human-caused climate change fueled the destructive winds and rain caused by Hurricane Melissa and increased temperatures and humidity that fueled the storm, according to an analysis released Thursday.
Melissa was one of the most powerful atlantic Hurricane hits land and brings devastating weather Jamaica, haiti, Dominican Republic And CubaWhich caused dozens of deaths throughout the Caribbean region. Roofs were blown off houses, hospitals were damaged, roads were blocked by landslides and crops were ruined.
A quick analysis from World Weather Attribution showed that climate change increased Melissa’s maximum wind speed by 7% and made rainfall 16% more intense. Scientists also wrote that the temperatures and humidity at which hurricanes intensified were six times higher than in the pre-industrial world due to climate change.
Rapid attribution analysis is a type of research that studies the factors influencing the occurrence of extreme weather and explores how the event would occur in a world without climate change. They are usually published a few days or weeks after an extreme weather event.
Melissa slowly tracked across the area and received enormous amounts of energy from the unusually warm ocean waters. The analysis showed that ocean temperatures along Melissa’s path through the Caribbean were about 1.4°C (2.5°F) warmer than the pre-industrial climate.
Theodore Keeping, a climate scientist who works for WWA and contributed to the analysis, said, “Warm ocean temperatures are effectively the engine driving the hurricane… The warmer the ocean temperature, the greater the hurricane’s wind speed.”
Melissa is the fourth hurricane in the Atlantic this year to undergo rapid intensification, which occurs when a tropical cyclone’s maximum sustained winds increase by at least 30 knots (about 35 mph or 56 kph) in 24 hours.
“The wind speeds of this rare storm would actually have been less than about 10 mph (16 kph) in a pre-industrial climate,” Keeping said. He said research links the hurricane’s wind speed to economic damage and that Melissa would have caused less destruction if the winds had been slower.
Scientists have linked the rapid intensification of hurricanes in the Atlantic to human-caused climate change. Planetary gases released by humans, such as carbon dioxide, deposit more water vapor in the atmosphere and raise ocean temperatures. Warmer oceans fuel storms to produce more rainfall and strengthen more quickly.
“It’s basically like taking a sponge and squeezing it, and climate change is making that sponge even bigger,” said Brian Tang, a professor of atmospheric sciences at the University at Albany.
Tang, who was not involved in the WWA research, said the methodology of the study released Thursday seems robust, and one of the more novel aspects of the analysis was the connection scientists drew between increased wind speed and damage, which he said is a challenging area of research.
Andrew Deshler, a professor of atmospheric sciences at Texas A&M University who was not involved in the WWA research, said the findings of the rapid analysis are consistent with existing research about climate change and tropical storms in the Atlantic. “This is perfectly in line with our expectation of what’s going to happen in the future,” Dessler said.
Rapid attribution analysis helps address the need for clarification about the impact of climate change immediately after a catastrophic weather event, Dessler said. He said such analyzes are “very valuable as a quick look” before scientists are able to perform more time-consuming calculations.
Dessler said one of the scariest aspects of Melissa was the winds reaching 185 mph (298 kph) at the storm’s peak. He said, “It’s very rare to have a storm this strong. And I think, to the extent that it’s a harbinger of the future, it’s not good.”
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