Damage from a tornado in Arabi, Laos, March 22, 2022 in a part of the city severely damaged by Hurricane Katrina seventeen years earlier. GERALD HERBERT/AP
Katrina, Haiyan, Sandy, Dorian, Maria… So many names of hurricanes and typhoons that have become sadly famous for the devastation they wreaked, causing thousands of deaths and hundreds of billions of dollars in losses. These extreme phenomena, the most damaging of all climate catastrophes, are projected to become more frequent. Man-made climate change is under threat, according to a Wednesday (27.
Today, between 80 and 100 storms and tropical cyclones form on average worldwide each year, mainly in the Northwest Pacific, but also in the southern Indian Ocean, the Northeast Pacific and the North Atlantic. These eddies arise when the sea surface temperature is high (generally higher than 26 °C), the atmosphere is unstable and the winds are relatively homogeneous.
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stronger winds
According to the international team of researchers responsible for this study, the number of cyclones worldwide should decrease slightly in the coming decades, but their intensity will increase, with maximum wind speeds rising up to 24% on average in different basins. Doubtful: the increase in surface water temperature associated with climate change, allowing cyclones to develop more energy to develop.
The strongest hurricanes – from category 3 on the Saffir-Simpson scale, i.e. maximum wind speeds greater than 178 km/h – will occur more frequently in absolute and proportional terms in almost all sea basins due to climate change, while less strong systems such as tropical storms (with Wind speeds between 64 and 118 km/h) will be less numerous.
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The study points to two exceptions: the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean, which will see the same number of intense cyclones, and the Bay of Bengal, which, on the contrary, will see a decrease in these most violent phenomena. “Our models predict that the area where cyclones form will move towards India and Sri Lanka, so they land faster and have less time to build up in intensity in the ocean,” says Nadia Bloemendaal, a researcher at the institute for Environmental Studies at the University of Amsterdam (Netherlands) and first author of the study.
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