Study suggests climate change made Hurricane Melissa 4 times more likely

This story is original Featured in Inside Climate News and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Hurricane Melissa, fueled by unusually warm waters, this week transformed into one of the strongest Atlantic storms ever recorded. A new rapid attribution study now suggests that human-induced climate change has made deadly tropical cyclones four times more likely.

Hurricane Melissa hit Jamaica on Tuesday, causing devastation across the island before hitting neighboring Haiti and Cuba. The storm, which has reached Category 5 hurricanes with strong winds, has killed at least 40 people across the Caribbean so far. Now that it has weakened to a Category 2 hurricane, it is continuing toward Bermuda, where it will likely make landfall Thursday evening, according to the National Hurricane Center.

Initial reports of damage were catastrophic, especially in the worst-hit western Jamaica. Winds reached 185 mph and heavy rains destroyed entire neighborhoods, destroyed large tracts of farmland and forced more than 25,000 people – locals and tourists alike – to seek shelter in shelters or hotel halls. According to a new attribution study by Imperial College London, climate change has increased Melissa’s wind speeds by 7 percent, resulting in a 12 percent increase in damage.

Experts say losses could reach tens of billions of dollars.

The findings echo similar reports released earlier this week about how global warming is contributing to the likelihood and intensity of Hurricane Melissa. Each analysis adds to a growing body of research showing how warming oceans due to climate change are fueling the conditions needed for stronger tropical storms to develop.

Hurricane Melissa is “kind of a typical example of what we expect in terms of how hurricanes respond to a warming climate,” said Brian Soden, a professor of atmospheric sciences at the University of Miami, who was not involved in the latest analyses. “We know that ocean temperatures are rising [are] They are driven almost exclusively by increased greenhouse gases.

The storm has disrupted every aspect of life in this part of the Caribbean.

“There has been a major disruption in services. We have people living in shelters all over the country,” Dennis Zulu, the UN resident coordinator in Jamaica, told a news conference on Wednesday. “What we see in the initial assessments is that the country has been devastated to levels never seen before.”

Climate connection

For the rapid attribution study, researchers at Imperial College used the peer-reviewed Imperial College Storm Model, known as IRIS, which created a database of millions of synthetic tropical cyclone tracks that can help fill in gaps about how storms work in the real world.

The model essentially runs simulations about the probability of a given storm’s wind speeds — which are often the most damaging factor — in a pre-industrial climate versus today’s climate. Applying IRIS to Hurricane Melissa is how researchers determined that human-caused warming increased hurricane wind speeds by 7 percent.