More storms like Hurricane Sandy could be in the East Coast’s future, potentially costing billions of dollars in damage and economic losses.
AMERICAN GEOPHYSICAL UNION
CREDIT: NASA GODDARD
WASHINGTON—By the late 21st century, northeastern U.S. cities will see worsening hurricane outcomes, with storms arriving more quickly but slowing down once they’ve made landfall. As storms linger longer over the East Coast, they will cause greater damage along the heavily populated corridor, according to a new study.
In the new study, climate scientist Andra Garner at Rowan University analyzed more than 35,000 computer-simulated storms. To assess likely storm outcomes in the future, Garner and her collaborators compared where storms formed, how fast they moved and where they ended from the pre-industrial period through the end of the 21st century.
The researchers found that future East Coast hurricanes will likely cause greater damage than storms of the past. The research predicted that a greater number of future hurricanes will form near the East Coast, and those storms will reach the Northeast corridor more quickly. The simulated storms slow to a crawl as they approach the East Coast, allowing them to produce more wind, rain, floods, and related damage in the Northeast region. The longest-lived tropical storms are predicted to be twice as long as storms today.
The study was published in Earth’s Future, which publishes interdisciplinary research on the past, present and future of our planet and its inhabitants.
The changes in storm speed will be driven by changes in atmospheric patterns over the Atlantic, prompted by warmer air temperatures. While Garner and her colleagues note that more research remains to be done to fully understand the relationship between a warming climate and changing storm tracks, they noted that potential northward shifts in the region where Northern and Southern Hemisphere trade winds meet or slowing environmental wind speeds could be to blame.
“When you think of a hurricane moving along the East Coast, there are larger scale wind patterns that generally help push them back out to sea,” Garner said. “We see those winds slowing down over time.” Without those winds, the hurricanes can overstay their welcome on the coast.
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.”
From 2010 to 2020, U.S. coastlines were hit by 19 tropical cyclones that qualified as billion-dollar disasters, generating approximately $480 billion in damages, adjusted for inflation. If storms sit over coasts for longer stretches, that economic damage is likely to increase as well. For the authors, that provides clear economic motivation to stem 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.
Co-author Benjamin Horton, who specializes in sea-level rise and leads the Earth Observatory of Singapore at Nanyang Technological University, said, “This study suggests that climate change will play a long-term role in increasing the strength of storms along the east coast of the United States and elsewhere. Planning for how to mitigate the impact of major storms must take this into account.”
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Notes for Journalists:
This research study was published with open access and is freely available. Download a PDF copy of the paper here. Neither the paper nor this press release is under embargo.
Paper title:
“Evolving tropical cyclones tracks in the North Atlantic in a warming climate”
Authors:
- Andra J. Garner (corresponding author) Department of Environmental Science, Rowan University, Glassboro, New Jersey, USA
- Robert E. Kopp, Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences and Institute of Earth, Ocean, and Atmospheric Sciences, Rutgers University, Piscataway, New Jersey, USA
- Benjamin P. Horton, Earth Observatory of Singapore, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore
JOURNAL
Earth s Future
DOI
ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE
22-Nov-2021
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1) Gross assumptions.
2) Fantasy storms.
3) Run using IPCC’s impossible RCP 8.5 scenario.
All fantasies and delusions.
Did they arrive at this conclusion with computer models or chicken entrails?
that far out both are as accurate…
I’d actually give the edge to chicken entrails – at least they don’t have any bias.
They said could so it’s not definite.
If the affect is real, it should be visible in real world storms.
The fact that this affect can only be found in computer models and not in the real world should be your first clue that this is all fantasy.
Storms are not more violent or persistent…it’s just that more people move to and live in regions of the planet that experience these storms.
Did I miss the part where they compared any of their results or conclusions to reality, or are we just skipping that now?
So-called “climate science” has been divorced from reality for a long time – you aren’t keeping up.
From the article: “More storms like Hurricane Sandy could be in the East Coast’s future, potentially costing billions of dollars in damage and economic losses.”
Well, Hurricane Sandy was actually two big storm fronts, Sandy and a Noreaster coming out of Canada, that had combined over New York.
So you are saying more combination storms are in our future?
Silly American Geophysical Union and your “Peer-reviewed Publication.
Another Science Association promoting climate change propaganda.
Their leadership is totally corrupt.
Do you supposed they missed the fact that Sandy was actually two storms combined? I don’t. I think they are deliberatately misconstruing the events to make it appear that Sandy was a superstorm all in itself and more are to come.
Lies, distortions and climate change propaganda is what we get out of the American Geophysical Union. It’s members ought to resign in protest at the distortions of facts that issue from their organization.
I believe 100s already have, but they’re just ignored, gaslighted or cancelled.
Over the last 500 years, “authoritative” Wikipedia (cough) estimates that “Eighty-five tropical or subtropical cyclones have affected the state of New York”. So at an average rate of 17 storms per century, the authors’ >35,000 computer-simulated storms would in reality take over 200,000 years to occur. That alone shows the utter absurdity of their pseudo-research.
What the paper really demonstrates is the vast number of climate alarmist researchers lingering over northeastern cities.
From the article: ““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 work produced computer models, not evidence.
There is no evidence that CO2 will make hurricanes stronger, or linger longer than “normal”, and there is no evidence that CO2 is causing the Earth’s temperatures to climb.
They are working on totally unsubstantiated assumptions, and feeding these assumptions into their computer models and then think the output is evidence of something.
This is how Alarmist Climate Science is carried out.
You could harden the cities that will hypothetically experience these hypothetically “lingering” storms for a pittance compared with the trillions they want to spend cutting emissions that in reality do nothing to the hypothetical storms.
So there’s that.
The Build Back Better (for the northeast) Plan aka Schumer Rules plan accepts cash, check, crypto, and your next two generations of labor to pay for their regional wish list.
I wonder if this paper has been published in Mandarin or Hindi.
I read the article and all I can say is
HOGWASH
And Abraham waved his staff and the winds slowed and then Abraham waved his staff again and the Gulf Stream current slowed. Then Abraham addressed the UN and demanded all the bank granaries be opened or he would bring forth a……. Attention: Your 30-day free trial of the Abraham simulation game has ended.
Thirty-five thousand computer-simulated storms? At an average of 17 or so named storms in the Atlantic per year, have these people tried to simulate every anticipated hurricane until AD 4000? What about the next Little Ice Age, which may occur before then?
Nobody should try to blame “global warming” for the damage caused by Hurricane Sandy in late October 2012. Most hurricanes that move up the east coast of North America (north of Cape Hatteras) either never make landfall (the eye remains out to sea) or possibly make landfall in Newfoundland or Nova Scotia, or (more rarely) Long Island or Cape Cod.
About five days before Sandy made landfall (when it was still over Jamaica in the Caribbean), weather forecasters predicted that Sandy would be steered into the mid-Atlantic coast by an unusually COLD air mass over the North Atlantic (east of Newfoundland and south of Greenland). This turned out to be accurate, as the eye of Sandy struck near Atlantic City, New Jersey. Sandy also brought heavy snow to West Virginia, which was unusually early in late October.
The unusual path of Sandy was not due to global warming, but local cooling!
More computer games?
” … more than 35,000 computer-simulated storms … ”
Do these games have points and penalties? Who is getting the higher scores?
“From 2010 to 2020, U.S. coastlines were hit by 19 tropical cyclones that qualified as billion-dollar disasters, generating approximately $480 billion in damages, adjusted for inflation. If storms sit over coasts for longer stretches, that economic damage is likely to increase as well. For the authors, that provides clear economic motivation to stem rising greenhouse gas emissions.”
That bolded belief by the authors qualifies as 2021 Non-sequitur of the Year Award in my book. And it merely shows how climate change is a pagan religion based on blind faith and nonsensical belief.
Ending the construction of wood frame houses along the coast would save far more in “damages” than all the greenhouse gas emission reductions we could possibly make, which will do absolutely nothing about weather related damages.
Yet nobody proposes such common sense and risk free solutions.
So basically their proposal is “spend trillions we don’t have to spend and commit economic suicide and you could hypothetically save billions.”
It’s amazing what passes for possessing psychic powers these days.
I miss the crystal balls, madras tapestries and flickering candles that real psychics use.
From the paper:
Yes Virginia, they really are that dumb.
Why are they running simulations for the late 21st century? Everything on the planet will be dead well before then due to climate change or so I’ve been told.
Perhaps they ought to simulate who’s going to win the lottery for the same date.
Dr. Garner, lead author, is a Penn State graduate and is coauthor on at least one paper with Mann, so she appears to be a Michael Mann disciple/sycophant. Rowan University is a refocused former normal school (i.e., basic teachers’ college), and her department is staffed by kids barely out of diapers who have likely never had real jobs. This is confirmed by the utter nonsense being promoted by this pseudo-research paper.
We have far too many academic environmental sciences faculty and students in thousands of colleges and universities vying for a piece of the government pie. In general, an “environmental studies” degree isn’t worth the paper on which it is printed. These folks don’t make/build/manufacture anything useful to society, so most will have to be redirected into jobs in other fields. Time to defund these departments.
Lost interest as soon as I read “computer simulations” no matter how many of them were run.
More simulations of the expected outcomes. If they expected to find a magic grasshopper driving tornados they would simulate that. Useless drivel.
Wow a real turkey for thanksgiving
Video games. So what?