What used to be a rare one-two punch of consecutive hurricanes hitting the same area in the United States weeks apart seems to be happening more often, and a new study says climate change will make back-to-back storms increasingly frequent and nastier. Using computer simulations, Princeton University scientists calculate that the deadly storm duet that used to happen once every few decades could happen every two or three years as the world warms, according to a study in Monday’s Nature Climate Change. Louisiana and Florida residents have already felt it, reports the AP.
In 2021, Hurricane Ida blasted Louisiana with 150mph winds. Just 15 days later a weakening Nicholas came nearby, close enough for its wind, rain, and storm surge to add to the problems, said study co-author Ning Lin, a climate scientist at Princeton. The Ida-Nicholas combo came after Louisiana was hit in 2020 by five hurricanes or tropical storms: Cristobal, Marco, Laura, Delta, and Zeta. Laura was the biggest of those, with 150mph winds. After Laura, relief workers had set up a giant recovery center in a parking lot of a damaged roofless church when Delta approached, so all the supplies had to be jammed against the building and battened down, said United Way President Denise Durel. “You think it can't be happening to us again,” Durel recalled 2 1/2 years later from an area that is still recovering.
Florida in 2004 had four hurricanes in six weeks, prompting NOAA to take note of a new nickname for the Sunshine State—"The Plywood State,” from all the boarded-up homes. “We found a trend,” Lin said. “Those things are happening. They’re happening more often now than before.” There’s a caveat to that trend. There haven’t been enough hurricanes and tropical storms since about 1950—when good recordkeeping started—for a statistically significant trend, Lin said. So her team added computer simulations to see if they could see such a pattern and they did. Lin’s team looked at nine US storm-prone areas and found an increase in storm hazards for seven of them since 1949. Only Charleston, South Carolina, and Pensacola, Florida, didn’t see hazards increase.
story continues below
The team then looked at what would happen using a worst-case scenario of increasing carbon dioxide emissions and a more moderate scenario in line with current efforts worldwide to reduce greenhouse gases. In both situations, the frequency of back-to-back storms increased dramatically from current expectations. The reason isn’t storm paths. It’s based on storms getting wetter and stronger from climate change as numerous studies predict, along with sea levels rising. The study looked heavily at the impacts of storms more than just the storms themselves. Studies are split on whether climate change means more or fewer storms overall, though. But Lin said it’s just the nastier nature and size that increases the likelihood of back-to-back storms.
(More
hurricanes stories.)
,
uBlock 
,
and
Ghostery 
)
