Hurricanes

Tornadoes, Floods and Hurricanes Loom, but the Government Is Running Out of Money to HelpThe Federal Emergency Management Agency’s disaster response fund could run out this summer. It dealt with a similar situation last year, which led to a slowdown in rebuilding projectsBy Thomas Frank & E&E NewsA destroyed house is seen in Keaton Beach, Florida on August 30, 2023 after Hurricane Idalia made landfall. Idalia slammed into northwest Florida as an "extremely dangerous" Category 3 storm early Wednesday, buffeting…

When Hurricanes Strike, Climate Change Dominates Social MediaTweets about climate change increase 80 percent when a hurricane hits and triple when the storm is a big oneBy Gina JiménezView of the damaged caused by Hurricane Michael in Mexico Beach, Fla., on October 13, 2018. Climate change felt impossible to ignore last summer as wildfire smoke blanketed the East Coast, a surprise hurricane wrecked a Mexican town, and heatstroke killed dozens in Phoenix, Ariz. Now research in PLoS Climate shows such extreme events really…

As climate change supercharges some hurricanes, scientists are exploring how to better communicate their force to the public — including adding an extra category to reflect their power.The current maximum on the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Wind Scale is Category 5, which is open-ended to any storm with wind speeds greater than 252 km/h. A new peer-reviewed study, published Monday in Environmental Sciences, examined storm data between 1980 and 2021 and found five storms that would have been classified as Category 6 — all of…

This story was originally published by Grist. Sign up for Grist’s weekly newsletter here.Stay in Your Seats, It's Gonna Be a Bumpy Flight | Extreme EarthA super-hurricane is brewing in the Atlantic Ocean in the opening pages of The Displacements, a novel by Bruce Holsinger published in 2022. “This is the one the climatologists have been warning us about for 20 years,” one character declares. Forty pages in, so-called Hurricane Luna makes a surprise turn for Miami and ends up demolishing Southern Florida with a wall of…

Hurricane Patricia over the eastern Pacific Ocean. Credit: NASA For more than 50 years, the National Hurricane Center has used the Saffir-Simpson Windscale to communicate the risk of property damage; it labels a hurricane on a scale from Category 1 (wind speeds between 74–95 mph) to Category 5 (wind speeds of 158 mph or greater). But as increasing…

After a year of record-breaking wildfires across Canada and the hottest temperature ever recorded on Earth, it likely comes as no surprise that 2023 was the hottest year on record.According to the European Union's Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S), 2023 was 1.48 C warmer than the pre-industrial average from 1850-1900, beating out 2016's record of 1.25 C. Do you have a question about climate change and what is being done about it? Send an email to [email protected] As we continue to burn fossil fuels and pump greenhouse…

As Hurricane Larry curved north in the Atlantic in 2021, sparing the eastern seaboard of the United States, a special instrument was waiting for it on the coast of Newfoundland. Because hurricanes feed on warm ocean water, scientists wondered whether such a storm could pick up microplastics from the sea surface and deposit them when it made landfall. Larry was literally a perfect storm: Because it hadn’t touched land before reaching the island, anything it dropped would have been scavenged from the water or air, as…

Credit: CC0 Public Domain Twitter users in areas affected by major hurricanes discussed climate change much more frequently right after the hurricane, according to a study published November 23, 2023 in the open-access journal PLOS Climate by Maddalena Torricelli from the City University of London, UK, and colleagues. There's…

Three pairs of satellites comprise the TROPICS constellation and will work in concert to provide microwave observations of storms on Earth, measuring precipitation, temperature, and humidity of a storm as often as every 50 minutes. Credit: NASAObservations made by NASA’s newest storm-watching satellites captured the evolution of Hurricane Adrian’s structure as the storm strengthened.In the final week of June 2023, the season’s first Eastern Pacific hurricane spun off the coast of Mexico. The storm—Hurricane Adrian—steered…

This series of still images, produced with data acquired by TROPICS, shows structural changes within Hurricane Adrian as the storm intensified. Credit: NASA Earth Observatory images by Lauren Dauphin, using data provided by the TROPICS team NASA's newest storm-watching satellites have collected their first views of hurricanes, offering scientists a new tool for understanding the inner workings of storms over shorter time…