Last year’s hurricane season was a very bad one. With 21 storms from June 1 to Nov. 30, for the second year in a row, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration ran out of names on its official list and had to turn to a backup. Eight hurricanes hit the United States, and one – Ida – killed at least 82 people and caused about $60 billion in damage as it headed from Louisiana to New Jersey, according to federal officials.
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But if things don’t change much in terms of climate change, the future will be even worse. In a warmer climate, hurricanes will move faster toward the Northeast coast and then slow down once they arrive, causing more damage and flooding to vulnerable coastal communities. In a study published in November in the journal Earth’s Future, a team from three universities looked at storm-tracking data from the past 100 years and fed it into a global climate model that takes into account changes in environmental conditions caused by heat-trapping greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide and methane.
The researchers focused on the northeastern United States, which has the largest population centers living along the coast. “We found that storms form a little further north and west in the Atlantic, move faster toward the Southeast coast, and travel slower along the East Coast,” says lead author Andra Garner, an assistant professor of environmental science at Rowan University in New Jersey. “This is a surprising finding.”.
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The study finds that Norfolk, Virginia and Boston will be at greater risk of tropical storms by the end of this century, while New Yorkers will face slightly less risk. That's because future storm tracks will likely shift slightly east or west as hurricanes emerge from their "warm-water nursery" in a large swath of ocean between the Caribbean and the western Atlantic and then are driven north by high winds, ocean currents and a curve in their path caused by the planet's rotation, known as the Coriolis.
Source of information: wired.com
