"Hurricanes really are getting stronger, just like climate models predicted"
Studying how hurricanes have changed over time is difficult. The tools scientists use to study them change constantly and. measurements made with one instrument can't be compared easily to measurements made with another. So though research has suggested the warming world would produce wilder and stronger hurricanes, it's been difficult to say that with certainty. Until now, the data just hasn't been complete enough.. A new paper, published online May 18 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, aims to change that — studying a period of 39 years, between 1979 and 2017. Looking at the full four-decade span and normalizing their data in a certain way, the researchers found a clear trend: Storms are getting stronger in general, and major tropical cyclones are coming more often.
Tropical cyclones (TCs), and particularly major TCs, pose substantial risk to many regions around the globe. Identifying changes in this risk and determining causal factors for the changes is a critical element for taking steps toward adaptation. Theory and numerical models consistently link increasing TC intensity to a warming world, but confidence in this link is compromised by difficulties in detecting significant intensity trends in observations. These difficulties are largely caused by known heterogeneities in the past instrumental records of TCs. Here we address and reduce these heterogeneities and identify significant global trends in TC intensity over the past four decades. The results should serve to increase confidence in projections of increased TC intensity under continued warming.
