Climate in the News, Oct. 18

AccuWeather

AccuWeather Forecasting Senior Director Dan DePodwin and AccuWeather Climate Expert Brett Anderson discuss top headlines relating to hurricanes and climate change.

Transcript

00:00We have a couple interesting climate stories to cover. Our first here is from

00:04the Washington Post that talks about the slow movement and stalling of some

00:09hurricanes and how that's becoming more frequent over the last several decades.

00:13We'll bring in Brad Anderson to talk about that and it's really interesting

00:16especially because some of the recent storms in decades like the Harvey in

00:202017 and even just the rain from Helene just about a month ago. Yeah we're seeing

00:27a 10% decrease in the forward speed of tropical cyclones making a landfall

00:31along the US coastline since the mid-1940s. Also stalling storms are

00:38becoming more frequent storms that just completely stop and go nowhere 1.5%

00:44increase per year since the mid-1960s. So that's two big things right there. What

00:49is this resulted in? This is resulting in a 37% increase in heavy rainfall events

00:55across the southeastern United States. Do we have an understanding of sort of why

00:58this slow movement is becoming more frequent? Yeah I mean one

01:03possible explanation for this is the warming of the Arctic. The Arctic's been

01:07warming two to three times faster than the rest of the planet. So when you see

01:10that you're getting less temperature difference between the Arctic and the

01:14mid-latitudes. Well a strong jet stream needs a strong tight temperature

01:18gradient. With less temperature gradient between the north and the south the jet

01:22streams are weaker. Weaker jet streams mean slower moving storms. Yeah and one

01:26of the really big risks from slow-moving storms is the flooding rainfall that can

01:30occur because the storm sits over the same place for days on end. That happened

01:33in Harvey in 2017 and Allison in 2001 which was only a tropical storm in Texas.

01:37And that's one of the reasons AccuWeather developed the real impact

01:40scale for hurricanes where we're communicating the risks of not just the

01:44wind that the Saffir-Simpson scale does but also the impacts of storm surge and

01:47the flooding rainfall that comes with these storms that really causes the

01:51significant impacts. With that we'll transition to our second story from the

01:54Imperial College of London that talks about how climate change could have

01:59impacted Milton and Milton's impact. So there's a it's hard to say that any one

02:03storm is caused by climate change but there's more and more science now that

02:06talks about how climate change has enhanced the risks from a given storm.

02:09Yeah so we're getting more powerful computer models to help us get these

02:13answers. Also you need to do your homework and look back in the past way

02:17back in the past and compare the strength of storms way back when the

02:23frequency of these storms and compare to what's going on now and this helps us

02:26give the answers to what's going on and how climate change may be impacting

02:31storms. So what we found major hurricanes at least in this study they found that

02:35major hurricanes like Milton in the Gulf of Mexico are now 40% more common than

02:40what they were in pre-industrial times. Also 45% of the damage caused economic

02:46losses I should say by a storm like Milton are now being attributed to

02:50climate change. Yes significantly more obviously the exposure from people is

02:53significantly higher today a lot more vulnerable people along a coastline

02:56because of the building that we have done in some of these impacted areas. You

02:59can get more climate stories and information at www.accuweather.com

03:04slash climate.

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