“When you go back in time, the observations become more and more tiny,” said MIT meteorologist Keri Emanuel.
He added, “Without a doubt, we missed some storms” in the historical census dating back to the mid-nineteenth century.
So Emanuel brushed aside the old records and turned to computer simulations to recreate the climatic conditions of the past 150 years.
Using 3 different climate models, he scattered “seeds” or conditions that could lead to a storm across the models to see how many seeds a storm sprouted.
what is the result? The number of Atlantic storms, especially major hurricanes, has actually become more frequent with the increase in global temperatures, according to what was demonstrated by his study, which was published Thursday in the journal Nature Communications.
The results were largely consistent with the storm record observed by aircraft, satellites, land and ships earlier.
It is not clear why there are so many Atlantic storms, which account for 12 percent of all tropical cyclones in the world.
Models did not show similar increases in other cyclone-ridden regions such as the eastern Pacific or the Bay of Bengal.
Among the possible causes of the Atlantic phenomenon, Emanuel said, could be the change in ocean currents due to global warming.
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