According to an international study published in “Science Advances”, climate change will increase the frequency and intensity of category 3 cyclones and beyond.
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Katrina, Haiyan, Sandy, Dorian, Maria… so many names of hurricanes and typhoons reistencely famous by the devastation scenes they have trained, causing thousands of deaths and hundreds of billions of dollars in loss . These extreme phenomena, which generate the most damage among all climatic disasters, are led to be more frequent. According to a study published on Wednesday April 27 in Science Advances, climate change of human origin will more than double, on average, the probability of the most intense tropical cyclones in most regions of the world by 2050, putting many area of the globe at risk.
Today, between 80 and 100 tropical storms and cyclones are formed on average in the world each year, mainly in the northwest of the Pacific, but also in the south of the Indian Ocean, the northeast of Pacific and northern Atlantic. These whirlwinds are born when the temperature of the sea surface is high (generally greater than 26 ° C), the unstable atmosphere and the relatively homogeneous winds.
stronger winds
According to the international team of researchers in charge of this study, the number of cyclones should decrease slightly worldwide in the coming decades, but their intensity will increase, with maximum wind speeds that could increase up to 24 % on average in the various basins. In question: the increase in the surface temperature of the water, linked to climate change, which allows cyclones to draw more energy to develop.
So that the most intense cyclones – from category 3 on the Saffir -Simpson scale, i.e. maximum winds greater than 178 km/h – will be more frequent, absolute and proportionate, in Almost all of the ocean basins due to climate change, while less strong systems, such as tropical storms (with winds between 64 and 118 km/h), will be fewer.
The study points to two exceptions: the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean, which will record the same number of intense cyclones, and the Gulf of Bengal, which will on the contrary see a drop in these most violent phenomena. “Our models provide for a rise to India and Sri Lanka in the area where cyclones are formed, so that they will touch the land faster and have less time to save intensity in the ocean,” explains Nadia BloeMendaal, researcher at the Institute of Environmental Studies of the University of Amsterdam (Netherlands) and first author of the study.
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