Editorial: A Category 4 Hurricane That Killed Florida During the September 18 Flooding Season in the Sunshine State, and Its Effects on Tropical Climate Change
Editor’s Note: Adam H. Sobel, a professor at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory and Fu Foundation School of Engineering and Applied Science, is an atmospheric scientist who studies extreme events and the risks they pose to human society. Sobel is the host of the podcast “Deep Convection” and the author of “Storm Surge,” a book about Superstorm Sandy. He can be followed on the social network:@profadamsobel. His own opinions are contained in this commentary. View more opinion on CNN.
But climate scientists are increasingly beginning to be concerned that climate models may be wrong about the recent trend toward La Nina being an accident, and thus likely to reverse – it may represent the true way the Pacific responds to greenhouse gas increases, implying that it will continue. The reason for the activity to stay high or increase further would be provided by this.
Almost nothing happened after that. We got from June well into September, the typical peak of hurricane season, with only a few weak storms, none doing any real damage. Then wham. Fiona took down Puerto Rico’s power grid on September 18 (almost five years to the day after Maria had all but destroyed it) and then much of Nova Scotia’s in Canada, and then Ian, after knocking out power to all of Cuba, made landfall in Florida as a dangerous Category 4, one of the most destructive storms ever to hit the continental US, and decimated a wide swath of the Sunshine State.
The storm may have caused as much as $47 billion in insured losses in the state, which could make it the costliest storm ever to hit Florida. The loss due to flooding will be much higher since most of the damage is not covered by private insurance. There have been 76 deaths in the state because of the storm.
Instead, NOAA scientists separately put out information about how climate change affects hurricanes, floods, heat waves and other severe weather. “One of the difficulties, when an event is happening, is trying to combine those two into one,” Kapnick says.
On the other hand, the critical phrase in the above paragraph is “over most of the planet.” The North Atlantic is the basin that has the most influence on the risk of a storm in the United States. In the North Atlantic, there has been a clear increase from the quiet 1970s and 1980s to a much more active period, on average, since the mid-’90s.
The Atlantic “thermohaline circulation”, which involves sinking of coldArctic water and upwelling elsewhere, tends to warm and cool on multidecadal time scales.
Greenhouse gas increases charged the Atlantic with warmth after aerosols were cleaned up in the US and Europe in the 60s to 70s.
New science makes it difficult to predict the Atlantic further. The last three years of La Niña conditions, when the eastern equatorial Pacific is cooler than average, are just part of a persistent trend in that direction over the last 50 years. Climate models did not predict this, instead expecting global warming would cause a trend toward more El Nio-like conditions.
Leaders from Pakistan and Kenya, Senegal and the Bahamas connected the dots between a hotter Earth and devastating floods, storms, heat waves and droughts. And in a speech at the conference, President Joe Biden said more severe hurricanes and wildfires are wreaking havoc in the United States.
When an extreme event happens, the National Weather service has a singular focus on protecting lives and property. If the disaster continues, she says forecasters will try to answer questions about the role of climate change. They don’t know all the science about climate change, and aren’t active in doing that type of analysis.
Michael Wehner, a climate scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, says that federal forecasters such as the National Hurricane Center can also be effective transmitters of climate information. If these statements were part of forecasts and warnings people already trust and use, there would be more confidence in them.
The chief scientist at the National Ocean and Atmospheric Administration says it is difficult to include climate context in real time weather warnings. Kapnick has a background as a research scientist, and has worked on extreme-event attribution studies.
NOAA is currently reviewing how it communicates with the public about climate change, she says, in part because of a flood of interest from the public and from local officials who are grappling with more severe weather.
The day before the storm made landfall in Florida, the acting director of the hurricane center, Jamie Rhome, appeared on CNN and was asked how climate change might be affecting the storm’s intensification. He said they could talk about climate change later on. I want to focus on the here and now.”
Indeed, a preliminary analysis by Wehner and other climate scientists in the days after Ian made landfall estimated that climate change caused the storm to drop at least 10% more rain than it would have without global warming.
Climate Change, Electric Vehicles, and Floodproofing: How the North of New Zealand is going through a major rainfall event in July 19-2022
More support for electric vehicles, policies to cut greenhouse gas emissions, and an interest in do things like flood-proof your home are included.
It is unclear how long those attitudes will last after a disaster. Figuring that out is an active area of research. “There appears to be this window of time within which you might want to help people better understand what those risks are, and make links to climate change,” Wong-Parodi explains.
“I think that’s really important as we move forward, because it has implications for how we may want to communicate to the public about these types of events,” says Wong-Parodi.
The UK experienced a taste of the weather on July 19, 2022, and it will be many years later. Temperatures reached 40.3 degrees Celsius—soaring past the previous record by more than one-and-a-half degrees. Dozens of homes in east London were destroyed by fires, while elsewhere in the country, the heat pushed the power grid close to the point of failure. The worst year of heat since 2003 was in the summer of 2002 and 2,800 excess deaths among over-65s occurred.
Before the temperatures had even warmed, Friederike Otto was in her office at Imperial College London, preparing to answer the question that she knew she would be asked the following week: Is it the cause of climate change?
The MetService told CNN Tuesday is the day it is most concerned about. We are worried about the north of Auckland. They seem to bear the brunt of the next heavy rainfall event.”
Luis Fernandes, a meteorologist at the MetService, said the heavy rainfall would also put Auckland at risk of land slips, which are similar to landslides.
He said that when there is a large event like this, rivers can rise quickly, roads can fall and communities can be cut off.
There was a rain in New Zealand’s largest city on January 27th. That marked the most rainfall the city had ever seen in a day, and it was the equivalent of their entire summer’s worth of rain.
The north of New Zealand’s North Island is also receiving more rain than normal due to the La Niña climate pattern cycles in the Pacific Ocean that affect weather worldwide.
New Zealand is facing heavy rain and wind from the cyclone which killed a man in Auckland on Monday, Jan. 22: a weather forecast for the South Island
New Zealand police said that a body believed to be that of the man who was swept away is believed to have been found.
A drone operator located the body in the Onewhero area, south of Auckland, about 1 kilometer (0.6 miles) downstream from where he went missing, police said.
There were a number of homes damaged by flooding and extensive earth movements, he said. Some 350 people needed emergency accommodation, he added.
More than 2,000 people stayed in the airport’s terminals on Friday due to the flooding. The international terminal was not operational on Sunday.
He may well be right, but the evidence from attribution studies is yet to come, says James Renwick, a climate scientist and professor at the Victoria University of Wellington. The cyclone itself isn’t unusual for New Zealand, as they regularly spin out of the tropics and get close enough to cause alarm, he says. “We’re in line for these things on a reasonably regular basis. Renwick says that some of them were not remarkable and some of them were catastrophic.
We’re expecting 100 to 300mm. The totals for many parts of the north and east of the North Island are going to be much higher if Hilary stalls or slows down. This rain will cause more slip/landslides, road closed, flight canceled and potentially damage more homes as we saw in January.
There is a heavy rain watch for Gisborne, and also for the Coromandel Peninsula, where there is a chance of 200 to 400mm of rain.
Winds are likely to gust over 100 kph (62 mph) and could reach 150 kph (93 mph) in the higher terrain and along the immediate coastline. From Monday into Tuesday, the country should experience some of the worst of the storm.
The severe damaging wind and heavy rain and swell are a result of a storm. The trees could topple, which could cause the power to go out.
Along with rain and wind, there will be heavy swells along the coastline for eastern areas, as well as a storm surge of close to half a meter.
The biggest influence on the regional climate are the winds that blow over the country from west to east. They deposit a lot of rain on the west coast of the south island. Milford Sound, the famous fjord there that’s popular with tourists, is one of the wettest places on Earth, receiving a mean annual rainfall of 6.8 meters. The rain shadow that leaves the east coast is caused by the island’s mountains which force water out of the air.