Warming to make storms wetter, windier: new research

Climate change is increasing the amount of rain that hurricanes produce, and as global warming picks up storms, will become increasingly wetter and windier, according to new research.

The findings are based on extensive modeling that involved millions of computing hours on a supercomputer, and they show that climate change is already affecting the intensity of storms.

“Climate change so far – from preindustrial to present – has contributed to increases in total storm rainfall from Hurricanes Katrina, Irma and Maria by about 5-10 percent,” said the study’s lead author Christina Patricola. “Our simulations also strongly indicate that we can expect to see even greater increases in rainfall and stronger winds by the end of the century,” she told AFP.

Patricola and co-author Michael Wehner started by analyzing three major hurricanes: Katrina, Irma and Maria.

They used what Wehner refers to as a “hindcast attribution method” simulating first the scenario in which the storm occurred, and then a “counterfactual” storm in a world where climate change did not occur.

By comparing the difference between the two models, the researchers were able to determine which elements resulted from climate change.

They found climate change at the time of Katrina, which devastated parts of the United States in 2005, had increased the storm’s rainfall by 4-9 percent.