world's hurricanes are becoming strongerBreaking News: Study says the world's hurricanes are becoming stronger
The Ottawa Citizen
Thursday, September 15, 2005
The world must get ready for more big hurricanes - Category 4 and 5 storms, the strongest, are becoming more common, a new U.S. study says today.
Announced this afternoon, the study by George Institute of Technology and the U.S. National Center for Atmospheric Research says the world saw an average of 10 of these strong hurricanes a year in the 1970s. Since the early 1990s we have had an average of 18 per year, they say.
There aren’t more hurricanes worldwide - a fact that puzzles them. But they argue that warmer sea temperatures, whether caused by human-induced global warming or not - is feeding more energy into the storms.
This translates into higher winds (Category 4 winds begin at 210 kilometres an hour) and more rain.
Between 1970 and 2004 the average sea surface temperature in the tropics rose by about half a Celsius degree.
Between 1975 and 1989 the North Atlantic and Caribbean had 16 of these strongest hurricanes, the study says. But in another period of the same length, from 1990 to 2004, the number increased to 25.
The Western Pacific Ocean went from 85 to 116 strong hurricanes in the same time frame. The South Indian Ocean went from 23 to 50, and the Eastern Pacific from 36 to 49, the study says.
It's published in the latest edition of the journal Science.
© The Ottawa Citizen 2005