Dangerous Rapidly Intensifying Landfalling Hurricanes Like Michael and Harvey May Grow More Common

https://www.wunderground.com/cat6/Dangerous-Rapidly-Intensifying-Landfalling-Hurricanes-Michael-and-Harvey-May-Grow-More-Common

Picture from Hurricane Harvey; August 28, 2017 in Houston, Texas. Image credit: Joe Raedle/Getty Images.

 

 

 In a 2016 paper, “Will Global Warming Make Hurricane Forecasting More Difficult?” (available here from the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society), MIT hurricane scientist Kerry Emanuel explained that not only will global warming make the strongest hurricanes stronger, it will also increase how fast they intensify. Troublingly, intensification rates don’t increase linearly as the intensity of a storm increases--they increase by the square power of the intensity. Thus, we can expect future hurricanes to intensify at unprecedented rates, and the ones that happen to perform their rapid intensification just before landfall will be extremely dangerous.

 Hurricanes like Michael and Harvey that rapidly intensify just before landfall are among the most dangerous storms there are, since they can catch forecasters and populations off guard, risking inadequate evacuation efforts and large casualties.


With increasing coastal populations, limited skill in intensity forecasting, and steadily increasing sea levels, this potential increase in rapidly intensifying hurricanes results in the “risk of an increased frequency of poorly anticipated high-intensity landfalls leading to higher rates of injury and death,” wrote Dr. Emanuel. He recommended that “greater emphasis be placed on improving hurricane intensity prediction and on preparing populations to respond to high intensity landfalling hurricanes at short notice.”