Get Ready For The Next Category Of Hurricane Severity
Conditions are perfect to send this year’s tropical storms off the charts
Tropical storms get the majority of their power from sea surface temperatures. As a storm travels over the surface of the sea, it picks up ever more heat to fuel its intensity from the surface waters. Heat is the engine that gives a hurricane its incredible force, fuelling higher and higher wind speeds.
The past eight years have been the eight warmest years since we first started using thermometers to measure temperatures and keep records. They’re also the warmest in at least 125,000 years before that, and they’re getting warmer much faster than natural processes changed things in previous climate shifts. We’ve already crammed a lot more warming into the pipeline than Earth has seen in tens of millions of years, which hasn't caught up to us yet but is inescapably on its way. The return of El Niño pushed temperatures yet higher. 90% of warming is going into our oceans, so sea surface temperatures are incredibly high, repeatedly setting new all-time records, and therefore ready to turbocharge megahurricanes. El Niños strengthen wind shear over the Caribbean and Northern Atlantic. That can inhibit hurricane formation. It’s part of why we don’t necessarily expect a greater number of hurricanes, but it won’t…
