Weathered

- There's a mystery in hurricane science that has confused researchers for decades.

The last 40 years have seen a pretty shocking rise in hurricane energy.

And as ocean waters warm, hurricanes aren't just getting stronger, they're intensifying faster than ever before.

- You go to bed with a pretty weak storm and then wake up to a category five landfall, and that's, I think, everyone's worst nightmare.

- But the destructive storms we've been seeing might be about more than just climate change.

- It is not clear that the unambiguous recent increase over the last 40 years is part of a century scale trend.

- Starting in the fifties, hurricane activity dropped off for a few decades.

The southeast was spared from major hurricanes, but then the trend reversed again.

And now scientists are asking what happens next?

What we do know is that research and forecasting improvements have saved more lives and money than anything else.

- This is pound for pound, dollar for dollar, you know, one of the best investments the United States has ever made.

- But at this pivotal moment, broad and deep funding cuts are threatening the future of forecasting.

So with damages from these storms increasing exponentially, what happens if the storms change, but the models don't?

- We are seeing the strongest hurricanes become stronger, and that's largely driven by the warming of the planet.

How much do we wanna sacrifice?

- How much do we wanna risk?

- In this episode, I'm gonna find out.

There you go.

Alright.

Wow.

I've never sat in a cockpit before.

In the last decade, we've had incredibly destructive hurricane seasons, and that makes sense because climate change is making our oceans and atmosphere warmer, which fuels hurricanes.

But the story might not be that simple.

- When we look at that data carefully, what we see is that the last 40 years, that increase has been essentially a recovery from a deep well hurricane activity decreased very abruptly in the Atlantic.

- And during that time, shoreline populations from North Carolina to Florida exploded, growing by 36%.

From 1970 to 1980, - The Sunbelt had a big population growth.

A lot of infrastructure investment.

- Hurricanes were manageable and people wanted to live in these beautiful sunny places.

But what caused that major dip?

- There are two competing hypotheses.

One that it's natural variability that you have this ocean current that has on a timescale of 50 years gotten weaker from World War II to the seventies and getting gotten stronger.

And the alternative hypothesis that starting after World War II, we put a lot of sulfur in the atmosphere that reflected sunlight, cooled the ocean, and reduced hurricane activity.

And then following the 1970s, we've cleaned up that sulfur, and now we're in a warmer state.

They both are very strongly supported by the evidence, and they may both be contributing to what we saw, which might explain why the abrupt decrease and increase are so prominent.

- This culminated in 2005, a truly record breaking hurricane season.

There were 28 named storms, including four category five hurricanes.

And Hurricane Katrina was the most devastating hurricane to ever hit.

The US costing over $200 billion.

It was becoming clear that forecasts weren't accurate enough to protect the growing population from these devastating storms, and the US government decided it was time to do something about it.

- Around 2007 is when Congress funded the Hurricane Forecast improvement Program.

- Before 2007, forecasts were improving by just 0.4% per year.

After the hurricane forecast improvement program was implemented, that number grew to 3% per year.

- 3% might sound small, but when you add it all up, this means that forecasts are about twice as accurate now as they were when Katrina hit us.

So it's like three extra days of of time to make decisions.

- Hurricane forecasting is pretty remarkable these days.

Satellites provide clear images of a storm as it forms hurricane hunters fly planes into the eye and far above it to provide near realtime data.

And supercomputers churn out advanced models that paint a picture of how the storm will likely evolve.

That information is compiled and sent to emergency planners to get resources to the right places and evacuate communities in the path.

But it wasn't always like this.

For all of human history, coastal communities had no warning that a hurricane was coming until it was on their doorstep.

Back in 1900, meteorologists knew a storm was forming off Cuba, but with no satellites or wireless communication, no one knew where it would make landfall or how bad it would be.

- Galveston was hit by a hurricane that was essentially unforecasted, - Extreme winds, and a massive storm surge inundated the budding city of Galveston, Texas.

It was the deadliest natural disaster to ever hit The us.

Eight to 12,000 people were killed, and the city was essentially wiped off the map.

- And in 2008, hurricane Ike took pretty much the same track as the 1900 Galveston hurricane, and it was arguably stronger - In the us.

Just over 100 people died.

Too many, but a far cry from the 10,000 or so fatalities in 1900.

- As we have invested in better understanding the atmosphere in oceans, in building sophisticated observing systems that include satellites and advanced robots, and in building and using computers, and then putting that all together to give us better forecast, people's lives have been made safer, our property has been better protected.

- Ivan and his colleague Granado wanted to know just how much money is this improvement in forecasting saving the public?

And what they found is shocking.

- The rate of improvement generated after the implementation of the project reduce all of the losses by about 19% in average.

That's about $2 billion per hurricane.

- Voided damage from just one of these hurricanes is more than the entire budget of all weather forecasting United States like not just hurricanes like routine weather, like snow forecast, precipitation, forecasts, all of it.

- It's easy to take for granted the incredible advancements in hurricane forecasting.

But this year they've been under attack, major budget cuts, threaten Noah's research satellites, and even the hurricane hunters.

But now is not the time to flatline our progress because hurricanes are getting worse.

Remember the dip and rise in hurricane activity possibly from fluctuations in the AMOC and sulfur dioxide in the atmosphere.

Well, there's another factor at play.

- These two changes that have a timescale of about 50 years are superimposed on the long term warming of the planet driven by CO2.

What we think is happening is that in recent years as both the Atlantic current has returned to a stronger state and sulfur has been sort of pulled out of the air, the Atlantic, the effects of greenhouse gases on hurricane activity are starting to be felt more clearly.

- When we warm the planet, we're causing those storms to change in ways that makes them more dangerous, more intense rainfall like we saw with something like Hurricane Helene or Hurricane Harvey.

More intense storm surge like we saw from Hurricane Sandy storms strengthening more quickly because we've made our oceans warmer and really amped up that fuel source for them.

- So each hurricane you're hit with is gonna be worse on pretty much every dimension you could think about.

- As hurricanes get worse, and as people continue to move to risky places, forecasting becomes all the more critical.

The advancements we've made are truly astounding.

We've gotten really good at narrowing down the track of a hurricane.

We know days in advance where a hurricane will make landfall undoubtedly saving lives.

But there is one aspect of hurricanes that keeps defying forecasts rapid intensification.

- These storms are not only often difficult to forecast and to really plan for, but these storms are also some of the most damaging hurricanes that we see for our coastlines.

- In 2023, hurricane Otis surged from a tropical storm to a category five in less than 24 hours.

Forecasters were totally caught off guard and the results were catastrophic.

It was likely the costliest specific hurricane on record.

One of the best ways to see if storms will rapidly intensify is by flying into it.

So last year I visited Noah's hurricane hunters to learn how their tools create forecasts.

This is amazing, isn't it?

I love this.

- This airplane carries one of the most pivotal instruments we have on any hurricane reconnaissance aircraft.

And it's in the tail section of the airplane.

And in that tail is a Doppler radar, and it's actually doing what we call a, it's an equivalent of like a cat scan of a storm.

It's getting the three dimensional picture of the storm every time we fly through it.

So when we talk about rapid strengthening, right, things are changing really rapidly past to past, to past, to past.

The storm's gonna look a little bit different.

That radar allows us to get a view of that.

- We've made incredible advancements in the ability to forecast rapid intensification, but at the same time, it is one of the most clear changes we're likely to see as the climate warms.

As we get into this period of more rapid intensification, these missions are becoming even more critical.

- They are, yes.

So models, they love data.

We talk, they always love data, they love data, they love data.

A model that's trying to rapidly strengthen storm is gonna love the data even more, right?

So getting the airplane out there and, and the key is getting the airplane out there before it starts rapidly strengthening be in it.

While it's rapid strengthening, - The National Hurricane Center defines rapid intensification as a storm increasing in wind speeds by at least 34 miles per hour within 24 hours.

But climate change may be making that definition inadequate.

We're now regularly seeing storms that intensify at more than twice that rate, which some people are calling extreme rapid intensification.

Andrew wanted to know just how much the most extreme rapid intensification events are changing in a warming world.

- My work showed that if we look at storms in the 1970s and the 1980s, and we compare those to storms that happened from 2001 to 2020, Atlantic hurricanes are more than three times as likely as they used to be, to strengthen from what we would call a weak hurricane.

So category one or tropical storm into what we call a major hurricane.

Those most destructive hurricanes within 12 hours.

So it's become more than three times as likely that we see storms make that jump from a weak storm to a major storm in just 12 hours.

- Rapid intensification events are hard to predict, but with the massive improvement in technology, computing power and forecasting, it's becoming more and more possible.

- For thousands of years, humans in in this part of the world couldn't foresee hurricanes at all.

And now days ahead, you can be told not only that a hurricane is likely to come your way, but how strong it's likely to be, how rainy it could be, and also be given sort of some, some guidance as to what you should do.

It's amazing.

It's truly astounding what we've been able to build.

- But what happens if our progress flat lines or worse reverses climate change is already impacting hurricanes and will continue to supercharge storms of the future.

We need forecasting now more than ever, as we head into an uncertain world.

Do you live on the coast?

How have you noticed changes in hurricanes in your lifetime?

Let us know in the comments and see you next time on Weathered