Yes, it’s climate change: Why hurricanes are increasingly super-charged

I have been forecasting long enough to remember when we used to say "Well, we can’t pinpoint this specifically on climate change, but we know that in a warming world, x, y, z will become more likely."

We are now in that "the future is now" time where we can indeed specifically pin point events to climate change thanks to rapid attribution studies that use climatological statistical analysis and high powered computer models to extract the role of human-caused climate change.

Some great recent examples of these studies are the two devastating hurricanes that impacted the southeast in recent weeks. Let’s take a look at both Helene and Milton and the climate impacts.

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First up, Hurricane Helene. Climate Central’s "climate shift index," which is a rapid attribution model, shows that the ocean temperatures at one stage in its development was 2.3F above normal. That doesn’t sound like a lot but it’s a huge amount of extra heat content or energy.

Remember that water has twice the specific heat content of air (i.e. it takes more energy to heat up water than air, so it also releases twice as much energy). This factor alone was made 300 times more likely due to climate change. 90% of the extra heat on our planet has been absorbed by our oceans so far.

Let’s take a look at Hurricane Milton, which rapidly intensified by from a tropical storm to a category 5 hurricane in 24 hours. At the point when Milton became a category 5 hurricane, the water temperatures that were just 1.8F warmer than normal, were made 100 times more likely due to climate change.

This year and last have seen off the charts warmth in most of our global oceans and specifically in the tropical Atlantic and Gulf of Mexico. Take a look at the Gulf of Mexico temperatures:

The red line was 2023, the blue line is 2024 so far. Both years deviate far from the other years. That’s a lot of extra energy. We can measure the energy in the oceans by temperature anomalies (departure from normal) or by ocean heat content also. Either variable tells the same story:

This energy is utilized very efficiently by tropical storms and hurricanes. Their primary driving force are warm ocean waters. That’s because warmer water evaporates more, the air can hold more water vapor above it and when that water vapor condenses out within the thunderstorms, that extra energy is released, propelling vertical growth/instability within the hurricane. This is why we’re increasingly seeing storms intensify rapidly.

By definition, Hurricane Milton developed twice as fast as the rapid intensification criteria! These rapidly intensifying storms are harder to predict too because they can be on scales that are more difficult for forecast models to catch and maintain in a forecast scenario. Milton and Helen both met criteria for EXTREME rapid intensification. There’s been a notable increase in these events in the recent decades.

All of this is consistent with what climate models have predicted in a warming world and warming oceans. We won’t necessarily see more storms, but the storms that develop are becoming much stronger, much faster, with devastating and deadly consequences.

BMTN Note: The broader trend of increasingly severe weather and record-breaking extremes seen in Minnesota and across the globe can be attributed directly to the rapidly warming climate caused by human activity. The IPCC has warned that Earth is "firmly on track toward an unlivable world," and says greenhouse gas emissions must be halved by 2030 in order to limit warming to 1.5C, which would prevent the most catastrophic effects on humankind. You can read more here .

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