Ocean Warming and Increasing Extreme Rainfall

The most agile Atlantic hurricane season on record, with an astounding 30 named storms, occurred in 2020. The study, published in Nature Communications, investigates the impact of climate change on extreme rainfall in the North Atlantic throughout the season. According to the study, climate warming produced a 0.6C rise in sea surface temperatures in the North Atlantic Ocean between 1850 and2020. The authors find that the additional energy “intensified.” storms in the region, resulting in a 10% increase in “extreme.” rainfall. If this information makes you uncomfortable, I recommend going to 20 euro bez depozytu 2022 and enjoying some fun games to ease your mind.

“We don’t have to be worried about the end of the century.” “Right now, we need to prepare our coastlines for the changes in these storms,” the study’s lead author tells Carbon Brief. In a different research, scientists looked at the sequence of tropical storms and cyclones to impact some African countries over six weeks in early 2022. More than a million people were affected by the flooding generated by these storms. The researchers discovered that climate change increased the severity of rainfall during these episodes. However, the authors emphasize that they cannot calculate the impact of climate change due to a lack of historical rainfall data in the impacted countries.

Season of hurricanes

In 2020, the Atlantic hurricane season, which spans from June 1 to November 30, was the busiest. The season had 30 named storms, with half of them intensifying into “hurricanes” with 74 miles per hour sustained wind speeds. Newly created cyclones usually migrate westward over the Atlantic, increasing in size and intensity as they absorb energy from the sea. Before they turn northwards and dissipate, many make landfall in the Caribbean, causing storm surges that can cause damage to coasts. Tropical cyclones during the twenty-twenty Atlantic hurricane season resulted in at least 417 deaths and $51 billion in damage, making it the sixth most expensive season on record.

Warmth’s fingerprint

Attribution is a rapidly expanding discipline of climate science that tries to discover the “fingerprint” of global warming on the world’s weather, particularly extreme occurrences like heat waves, droughts, and storms. Much research has been conducted recently to analyze the impact of climate change on hurricanes. A Colombian university prof who was not involved in the study tells Carbon Brief that this is the first attribution study to look at the entire Atlantic hurricane season. While conducting attribution studies, scientists employ models to compare the current world to a “counterfactual” world without human-caused climate change. This study used the Community Earth System Model (CESM) to run a series of “hindcasts” to see how climate change might affect

Atlantic Ocean temperatures during the twenty-twenty hurricane season. A prof at Stony Brook University, as well as the study’s primary author, explains that a hindcast is “just a forecast, but instead of thinking what may happen next, you’re going back in time and [beginning from] a former position.“ The authors discovered that the North Atlantic has warmed by 0.6 degrees Celsius since 1850 by comparing counterfactual and real-world hindcasts. The Clausius-Clapeyron equation states that the air can store 7% extra moisture for every degree that the atmosphere warms. 

According to Reed, when the atmosphere can contain more moisture, it may also “rain out” more during storms, producing more severe rainfall. The authors isolated the drizzle induced by storms and excluded any other rain during the hurricane season by running simulations during the 2020 hurricane season. According to the article, the findings suggest that climate change caused a “subtle” rise in average storm rain during the 2020 hurricane season but more apparent changes in extreme rainfall.