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WASHINGTON, Sept. 30 (AP) — Climate change is causing Hurricane Ian to increase rainfall by at least 10 percent, according to a study prepared immediately after the storm showed.
Thursday’s study (not peer-reviewed) compared peak rainfall rates during a real storm with about 20 different computer scenarios, a model that features Hurricane Ian slamming the sun on a world without man-made climate change state.
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“Real storms are 10 percent wetter than probable storms,” said study co-author Michael Weiner, a climate scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
Forecasters are predicting 2 feet (61 centimeters) of rain when Ian stops raining in parts of Florida.
Wehner and Stony Brook University atmospheric scientist Kevin Reed published a study earlier this year in Nature Communications looking at hurricanes in 2020 and found that during their rainiest three-hour period, they were 10 wetter than the world without a greenhouse. % or more gases that trap heat. Wehner and Reed applied the same scientifically accepted attribution techniques to Hurricane Ian.
A long-standing rule of physics is that for every increase in temperature (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit), the air in the atmosphere can hold 7% more moisture. The Gulf of Mexico is 0.8 degrees warmer than normal this week, which means rainfall should increase by 5%. It turned out to be worse. A quick study found that the hurricane dropped twice as much – and rainfall increased by 10%.
10% might not sound like a lot, but 10% of 20 inches is 2 inches, which is a lot of rain, especially above the 20 inches that have fallen, Reed said.
Other studies have found the same feedback mechanisms for stronger storms in warmer weather, said Princeton University atmospheric scientist Gabriel Vitch, who was not involved in the study.
Overall, a warmer world does make storms wetter, says MIT hurricane researcher Kerry Emanuel. But he said he was reluctant to draw conclusions about individual storms.
“Because of climate change, we expect to do this on top of very heavy rainfall,” he said. “We’re going to see more storms like Ian’s.”
If the world is to recover from the disaster, “we need to plan for wetter storms in the future, because global warming isn’t going away,” Princeton’s Vitch said in an email. (AP)
(This is an unedited and auto-generated story from the Syndicated News feed, the body of the content may not have been modified or edited by LatestLY staff)
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