Climate Change Was The Engine That Powered Hurricane Maria's Devastating Rains
Source: NPR
Climate Change Was The Engine That Powered Hurricane Maria's Devastating Rains
April 17, 201910:41 AM ET
REBECCA HERSHER
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In a paper published Tuesday in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, scientists at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa and Sonoma State University in California analyzed rainfall from all 129 hurricanes that have affected Puerto Rico since reliable record keeping began in 1956.
They found that Maria was a behemoth compared with past storms that raked the U.S. territory. The average amount of rain Maria dropped on the island in a day — about 15 inches — was 30 percent more than the previous record set by a tropical storm in 1985, and 66 percent more rain than fell on average during what was previously the largest and costliest storm to ever hit the island, 1998's Hurricane Georges.
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The new study also set out to answer a question that, just a few years ago, scientists generally shied away from: What was the role of climate change in this single storm?
As climate change models have grown more sophisticated, the field of so-called attribution science has grown more robust, allowing scientists to start investigating how our current global climate affects specific weather events. Last year, scientists directly connected the warmest water ever recorded in the Gulf of Mexico to the record-setting rains that fell when Hurricane Harvey hit Texas.
This latest paper on Hurricane Maria makes a similar connection. The authors found that a storm of Maria's rain magnitude is nearly five times more likely to occur today, with warmer air and ocean water, than it would have in the 1950s, when global warming's effects were in their infancy.
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Read more: https://www.npr.org/2019/04/17/714098828/climate-change-was-the-engine-that-powered-hurricane-marias-devastating-rains
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Related: Extreme Rainfall Associated With Hurricane Maria Over Puerto Rico and Its Connections to Climate Variability and Change (Geophysical Research Letters)
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