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MIT Hurricane Study: Global Warming 'Pumping Up'
Destructive Power
Global warming is pumping up the destructive power of
hurricanes and typhoons, a new study published by Kerry Emanuel, a
Massachusetts Institute of Technology hurricane specialist suggests.
Emanuel's analysis of data on storm winds and duration, according to
New Scientist, shows that potential wind-caused damage has roughly
doubled over the past 30 years. His research shows that over the same
period, tropical sea-surface temperatures have increased only by half
a degree.
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An analysis of storm winds and duration shows that potential
wind-caused damage has roughly doubled over the past 30 years,
according to Emanuel, although tropical sea-surface temperatures have
increased by only half a degree over that time.
The frequency of hurricanes seems unaffected by global warming.
Regional totals vary periodically, but the number of tropical cyclones
around the world averages a steady 90 per year. But Emanuel's study is
the second in weeks to link storm intensity with climate.
Feeding peak sustained-wind data into his model, Emanuel calculated
the total potential destructive power over the life of all storms each
year since about 1950 in the world's two best-monitored areas - the
North Atlantic and the north-west Pacific. He found a striking
correlation between their destructive potential and sea-surface
temperatures.
Hurricanes are powered by the temperature difference between the top
of the sea and the air above the storm, so warmer water was expected
to pump the storms harder. But previous computer models had predicted
that the half-degree increase in sea-surface temperatures from global
warming over the past 30 years should have increased wind speed by
only about 3 percent, corresponding to a 10 percent increase in
Emanuel's estimate of destructive power.
Instead, Emanuel found that the destructive power of North Atlantic
storms more than doubled over the past 30 years. For north-west
Pacific storms, the increase was about 75 percent. He attributes the
sharp jump to increases in storm duration as well as much larger than
expected increases in wind power.
The results surprised Chris Landsea at the National Oceanic and
Atmospheric Administration's Hurricane Research Division in Miami, US.
"This is the first article that has a smoking gun between global
warming and hurricane activity," he told New Scientist.
Kevin Trenberth of the US National Center for Atmospheric Research in
Boulder, Colorado, says Emanuel's results parallel his study of storm
kinetic energy.
Yet some big questions remain. Storm winds are virtually impossible to
measure directly, and techniques for estimating them indirectly have
changed over the years. To adjust for those changes, Emanuel reduced
wind estimates in the 1950s and 1960s.
But Landsea says the unadjusted figures show no overall trend, raising
doubts over whether Emanuel's model is making the right corrections.
Although winds from that period looked too low in the past, Landsea
says that wind estimates may actually have been too low in the 1970s
through to the early 1990s.
Neither study considered changes in rainfall, which causes flooding
that has been responsible for many deaths and damage in recent storms.
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