ABOVE: Hurricane Harvey hit Texas in August 2017.
NASA/NOAA
Hurricanes are devastating, and we’re making them worse. Our activities, whether it’s by warming the climate or building concrete jungles, are intensifying rainfall and raising the risks of flooding, according to two papers published today (November 14) in Nature.
“Climate change has exacerbated rainfall and is set to enhance the wind speed,” Christina Patricola, a climate scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and coauthor of one of the studies, tells The Guardian. “My hope is that this information can be used to improve our resilience to the kinds of extreme weather events we are going to have in the future.”
She and her colleagues simulated how hurricanes such as Katrina in North America and Haiyan in Southeast Asia would have developed in different climates, from the pre-industrial and modern eras to three climate scenarios predicted for the end of this century. Rainfall ...
