Climate change added at least 10% of rain to Hurricane Ian, a study prepared immediately after the storm’s appearance.
Thursday’s research, which has not been peer-reviewed, compared maximum rainfall rates during a real storm with about 20 different computer scenarios for a model with the characteristics of Hurricane Ian hitting the Sunshine State in a non-human-caused world.
“A real storm was 10 percent wetter than a storm that probably is,” said Michael Weiner, a climate scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and study co-author.
Forecasters predicted Ian would fall as much as 2 feet (61 cm) of rain in parts of Florida by the time it stopped.
Wehner and Kevin Reed, an atmospheric scientist at Stony Brook University, published a study in Nature Communications earlier this year looking at 2020 hurricanes and found during periods of three hours of rainfall that they were 10% wetter than a world without greenhouse. Gases that trap heat. Wiener Reed applied the same scientifically accepted attribution technique to Hurricane Ian.
It is an old rule of physics that for every extra temperature Celsius (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit), the air in the atmosphere can hold 7% more water. This week, the Gulf of Mexico was 0.8 degrees warmer than usual, which meant about 5% more precipitation. The reality turned out to be even worse. The quick study found that the tornado decreased by twice that — 10% more rain.
10 percent may not seem like a lot, but 10 percent of 20 inches is two inches, which is a lot of rain, especially above the 20 inches that have already fallen, Reed said.
Other studies have seen the same reaction mechanisms for strong storms in warmer weather, said Gabriel Vicki, a Princeton University atmospheric scientist who was not part of the study.
Overall, a warmer world makes storms more rainy, said MIT hurricane researcher Keri Emanuel. But he said he was uncomfortable with drawing conclusions about individual storms.
“This work over very heavy rain is something we expected to see because of climate change,” he said. “We’ll see more storms like Ian.”
Princeton’s Vicki said in an email that if the world is to recover from disasters “we need to plan for wetter storms going forward, because global warming is not going away.”
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from San Jose News Bulletin https://sjnewsbulletin.com/study-finds-climate-change-added-10-to-ians-precipitation-4/
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