Storms growing stronger due to global warming, study confirms

Hurricanes, typhoons and cyclones are growing stronger in every region of the world because of climate change, new research suggests.

Using climate models created on supercomputers, scientists had predicted that most storm systems would become more intense. A study published yesterday drew on 40 years of satellite imagery to confirm the trend.

‘‘The study agrees with what we would expect to see in a warming climate like ours,’’ James Kossin, of the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration in the United States, who led the research, said.

‘‘The temperature high in the atmosphere sets a kind of a speed limit on what a hurricane can achieve. Climate change has been changing the environment and increasing that speed limit.’’

Known as hurricanes in the Atlantic and eastern Pacific oceans, typhoons in the western

Pacific and cyclones in the South Pacific and Indian Ocean, strong tropical storms account for the world’s costliest and deadliest weather disasters.

The research suggests that they will become more destructive. The probability of a hurricane having wind speeds of at least 185kmh increased by approximately 15 per cent between the 1980s and the 2010s, and the chance of category three, four and five storms – which account for more than 90 per cent of tropical cyclone damage – has steadily risen.

‘‘Our results show that these storms have become stronger on global and regional levels, which is consistent with expectations of how hurricanes respond to a warming world,’’ Kossin said.

‘‘It’s a good step forward and increases our confidence that global warming has made hurricanes stronger, but our results don’t tell us precisely how much of the trends are caused by human activities and how much may be just natural variability.’’

The findings, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, will chime with the experiences of many coastal communities. The frequency of severe hurricanes in the Atlantic Ocean, for instance, has roughly doubled over the past two decades.

In theory, the sustained windspeed of storms should increase with global surface temperatures as there is more energy for the evaporation of seawater. This influences the formation of clouds and leads to the differences in atmospheric pressures that create winds.

However, a long-term trend had been difficult to detect because of differences in how data has been gathered over the past 40 years.

AP Sun sets behind a patterned cloud formed over the city in Kolkata, West Bengal state, India. Cylone Amphan has intensified into a super cyclone over the Bay of Bengal and was expected to hit near the Sundarbans, south of Kolkata, last night.