Climate change is assisting Atlantic hurricanes in packing more punch, making them rainier, strengthening them faster, and extending their duration even after landfall. However, according to a recent statistical analysis of historical records and satellite data published in Nature Communications on July 13, there aren’t actually more Atlantic storms currently than there were around 150 years ago.
The unprecedented number of Atlantic hurricanes in 2020, with a total of 30 named storms, sparked considerable debate about whether and how climate change played a role (SN: 12/21/20). According to Gabriel Vecchi, a climate scientist at Princeton University, it’s an issue that experts are still debating. “How has global warming affected the quantity and intensity of hurricanes and tropical storms in the past and in the future?”
“With little uncertainty, how many storms, and how many major hurricanes [Category 3 and above] there were each year,” Vecchi said, using satellite statistics from the last 30 years. These figures clearly illustrate that the quantity, severity, and speed with which hurricanes intensify has grown over time.
However, he adds, “there are a number of things that have happened over the last 30 years” that might sway the trend. “One of them is global warming.” Another is reducing aerosol pollution (SN: 11/21/19). The amount of soot and sulfate particles and dust over the Atlantic Ocean was much larger in the mid-20th century than it is now, and those particles briefly cooled the globe enough to offset greenhouse gas warming by blocking and dispersing sunlight. This cooling is also likely to have slowed storm activity in the Atlantic for a while.
Vecchi and colleagues looked at a collection of hurricane measurements from the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration from 1851 to 2019 to acquire a longer-term perspective on patterns in Atlantic storms. It includes both old-school observations by unlucky souls who firsthand observed the tempests and modern satellite-era remote sensing data.