Hurricanes will arrive faster but slow down once they hit land in the northeastern United States by the late twenty-first century. According to a new study, as storms linger longer over the East Coast, they will cause more damage along the heavily populated corridor.
Climate scientist Andra Garner of Rowan University examined more than 35,000 computer-simulated storms in the new study. Garner and her colleagues compared where storms formed, how fast they moved, and where they ended from the pre-industrial period to the end of the twenty-first century to predict likely storm outcomes in the future.
The researchers discovered that future East Coast hurricanes will most likely cause more damage than previous storms. According to the study, more hurricanes will form near the East Coast in the future, and those storms will reach the Northeast corridor faster. As they approach the East Coast, the simulated storms slow to a crawl, allowing them to cause more wind, rain, flooding, and other damage in the region. Tropical storms are expected to last twice as long as they do today.
The study was published in Earth’s Future, a journal that publishes interdisciplinary research on our planet and its inhabitants’ past, present, and future.
Climate change, according to this study, will play a long-term role in increasing the strength of storms along the east coast of the United States and elsewhere. This must be considered when planning how to mitigate the effects of major storms.
Benjamin Horton
Changes in storm speed will be caused by changes in atmospheric patterns over the Atlantic, which will be triggered by warmer air temperatures. While Garner and her colleagues acknowledge that more research is needed to fully understand the relationship between a warming climate and shifting storm tracks, they speculate that potential northward shifts in the region where the Northern and Southern Hemisphere trade winds meet, as well as slowing environmental wind speeds, could be to blame.
“When you think of a hurricane moving up the East Coast, there are larger scale wind patterns that help push them back out to sea,” Garner explained. “Those winds are slowing down over time.” Hurricanes can overstay their welcome on the coast if the winds are not present.
Garner, whose previous work focused on the devastating East Coast effects of storms like Hurricane Sandy, particularly in the Mid-Atlantic, said the concern raised by the new study is that more storms capable of producing damage levels similar to Sandy are likely.
And the longer storms linger, the worse they can be, she said. “Think of Hurricane Harvey in 2017 sitting over Texas, and Hurricane Dorian in 2019 over the Bahamas,” she said. “That prolonged exposure can worsen the impacts.”
Between 2010 and 2020, the United States’ coastlines were hit by 19 tropical cyclones that qualified as billion-dollar disasters, causing approximately $480 billion in damages after inflation. Economic damage is likely to increase as storms stay over coasts for longer periods of time. According to the authors, this provides a clear economic incentive to reduce rising greenhouse gas emissions.
“The work produced yet more evidence of a dire need to cut emissions of greenhouse gases now to stop the climate warming,” Garner said.
The distribution of storms across the east coast is not even, and the state of Florida, along with North Carolina, accounts for the majority of the top cities. The infrastructure, home foundations, and local response systems in these cities must be strong enough to withstand repeated storm recovery.
The worst place in the country, according to the data, is Cape Hatteras on North Carolina’s Outer Banks. A hurricane or tropical storm has hit the city 108 times since 1871. That means a storm hits the coastal town every 1.33 years on average.
Benjamin Horton, co-author, and director of the Earth Observatory of Singapore at Nanyang Technological University, said, “Climate change, according to this study, will play a long-term role in increasing the strength of storms along the east coast of the United States and elsewhere. This must be considered when planning how to mitigate the effects of major storms.”
