The NASA published this Wednesday, November 16, a worrying report: seen from space, the Earth shows that the arctic is warming up almost four times faster than the rest of the planet – not twice as fast, as was recently estimated.
And the fact that hurricanes, cyclones and typhoons are getting stronger is also part of the same problem.
It should be made clear that both hurricanes, such as cyclones and typhoons they are the same meteorological phenomenon: a storm characterized by a closed circulation around a center of low pressure (a squall), which causes strong winds and very abundant rain. This storm receives a different name depending on where it occurs.
When these storms occur in the northern sector of the Atlantic Ocean, in the Caribbean Sea and in the northeastern sector of the Pacific Ocean, they are called “hurricane” (name that owes to a divinity of the populations of the Caribbean, Hurrican, god of evil). Are “tifones” if they occur in the Pacific Northwest. Y cyclonesif they break out above and below the equator in the western Pacific.
Worldwide, regarding 80 tropical cyclones form each year. However, there are also arctic cyclones.
climate apocalypse
In a job that NASA recently made public, it is concluded that we must prepare to have increasingly threatening hurricane seasonsinitially on the coasts of North America, but which will later also appear in other cold regions of the Polar Ocean Arctic.
In other words, they will intensify in large areas of the northern hemisphere, at least according to the investigations carried out, which continue their course.
And those hurricanes and cyclones will only get stronger as the climate continues to change.
NASA scientists project that a climate apocalypse it will begin to manifest itself in sixty years, as sea ice is lost, temperatures rise more rapidly, and puffs of warmer, wetter air reach the Arctic.
indomitable hurricanes
“When you say, ‘Are the hurricanes getting stronger? in the sense of “are they going to be category six?” The answer in that case will be no. Due to physics, hurricanes do not reach more than a category five”, anticipates Dr. Chelsea Parker, director of the NASA research team.
“However, we see more and more Atlantic hurricanes each season reaching category three, category four or category five compared to seasons 40 years ago,” adds Parker, Assistant Research Scientist at the Interdisciplinary Center for System Sciences. Terrestrial (ESSIC).
A 2020 study, published in the journal Natureanalyzed the hurricanes that affected North America between 1967 and 2018 and agrees with Dr. Parker.
According to that work, in the 1960s, hurricanes lost 75 percent of their strength over 24 hours following hitting the land coast. That has changed today, the force of a hurricane that makes landfall usually decrease only 50 percent during the first day.
“There is a great influence of climate change. The hotter the water, the stronger and more energy this system will have and it will simply increase in intensity. So are the hurricanes getting stronger? The answer to that will be yes. We are seeing more and more tropical cyclones becoming category three, four and five. So actually yes, we are seeing that change every season in recent years,” concludes Parker, also a researcher at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.
In 60 years, apocalyptic cyclones and hurricanes
“The most intense storms will be a danger for shipping activities, oil and gas drilling and extraction, fisheries and ecosystems, and Arctic biodiversity,” adds Parker.
“As the sea ice recedes, that opens up more area for these activities to take place, but it might also come with more dangerous weather.”
Parker and his colleagues analyzed computer simulations of nine cyclones that have struck the Arctic in the past decade. To better understand the future conditionsthe scientists simulated an Arctic with even warmer temperatures and less sea ice cover.
“When we add projected future climate change to the computer simulation,” Parker said, “we see a really grande of the cyclones“, anticipates the expert.
The team discovered that by the end of the century, in no more than 60 yearsthe wind speed of the cyclones might increase up to 61.16 kilometers per hour more than the current one, depending on the characteristics of the storm and the environmental conditions of the region.
Strongest cyclones, indomitable winds
In addition, the maximum intensity of these storms might be up to 30% greater and they are likely to be accompanied by heavier rainfall. If cyclones start to bring rain in the spring, sea ice may start to melt sooner and fewer will survive the summer melt season.
To provide a real basis for their models, Parker and his colleagues compared their simulations with direct observations of some Arctic storms collected in 2020 by the international MOSAIC expedition, a icebreaker sailing the North Polein winter, with state-of-the-art scientific instruments.
“Usually we don’t have a lot of data from Arctic weather stations to be able to do that, so MOSAiC was a key piece for us because we were able to use actual measurements to validate our model,” Parker said.
“We can say that our simulations current climatic conditions of these cyclones are realistic and that we can trust what the model is doing,” he said.
Scientists need more details regarding Arctic cyclones to make more accurate predictions regarding how the storms will affect sea ice, which is already declining, over the next 50 years.
MM / ED
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