This story originally appeared Inside climate news and is part of it Climate office cooperation.
Fueled by unusually hot waters, Hurricane Melissa turned into one of the strongest Atlantic storms ever recorded this week. Now recent quick attribution research suggests that human-induced climate change has quadrupled the likelihood of a deadly tropical cyclone.
Hurricane Melissa hit Jamaica on Tuesday, wreaking havoc across the island, before tearing through nearby Haiti and Cuba. The storm, which reached Category 5, a category reserved for hurricanes with the strongest winds, has so far killed at least 40 people in the Caribbean. Currently weakened to a Category 2, it continues its path toward Bermuda, where it is likely to make landfall Thursday evening, according to the National Hurricane Center.
Early reports of damage are devastating, particularly in hard-hit western Jamaica. Winds of up to 300 kilometers per hour and massive rains leveled entire neighborhoods, decimated gigantic swaths of agricultural land and forced more than 25,000 people – both residents and tourists – to seek shelter in shelters or hotel ballrooms. According to a recent study by Imperial College London, climate change increased wind speeds on Melissa by 7 percent, which increased damage by 12 percent.
Experts estimate that losses could reach tens of billions of dollars.
The findings resonate similar reports released earlier this week on the impact of global warming on the likelihood and severity of Hurricane Melissa. Each analysis adds to a growing body of research showing how ocean warming due to climate change is creating conditions necessary for stronger tropical storms.
Hurricane Melissa is “a textbook example of what we expect in terms of how hurricanes will respond to a warming climate,” said Brian Soden, a professor of atmospheric sciences at the University of Miami, who was not involved in the latest analysis. “We know that ocean temperatures are warming [are] driven almost entirely by increasing greenhouse gas emissions.”
The storm disrupted every aspect of life in this part of the Caribbean.
“There has been a massive dislocation of services. We have people living in shelters across the country,” Dennis Zulu, the UN resident coordinator in Jamaica, said at a news conference Wednesday. “In initial assessments, we see that the country has been devastated to a level never seen before.”
Climate connection
To rapidly study attribution, Imperial College scientists used Imperial College’s peer-reviewed storm model, known as IRIS, which has created a database of millions of synthetic tropical cyclone tracks that can lend a hand fill gaps in how storms act in the real world.
The model essentially simulates the likelihood of a given storm’s wind speeds – often the most damaging factor – in a pre-industrial climate compared to today’s climate. Applying IRIS to Hurricane Melissa allowed researchers to determine that human-induced warming increased the cyclone’s wind speeds by 7 percent.