As you might expect, I’ve had a lot of questions about hurricanes this week. Mostly they have been about Hurricane Dorian (I’ll post more about that in a minute), but some have been about hurricanes in general. One question I’ve gotten is whether hurricanes are affected by our warming climate. The answer is more complicated than you might think. The frequency of hurricanes does not seem to be related to the warmer climate, so in that sense, maybe not. However, the storms that do form are becoming more intense, and also slower, which leads to more extreme winds in higher intensity storms and more rain since the storms drop more rain as they meander across the landscape where in the past they moved more quickly.

One question that I have not seen answered yet is whether the hurricane season is expanding because sea surface temperatures are getting to the magic 80 F that is needed for hurricane formation earlier in the year. There is still a lot of research to do on this topic. Here are a couple of articles about this topic:

https://coss.fsu.edu/geography/activities/how-does-climate-change-affect-atlantic-hurricanes/

https://www.yaleclimateconnections.org/2019/07/how-climate-change-is-making-hurricanes-more-dangerous/