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