Global warming is likely to produce a significant increase in the intensity and rainfall of hurricanes in coming decades, according to the most comprehensive computer analysis done so far.
By the 2080s, seas warmed by rising atmospheric concentrations of heat-trapping greenhouse gases could cause a typical hurricane to intensify about an extra half step on the five-step scale of destructive power, says the study, done on supercomputers at the Commerce Department's Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory in Princeton, New Jersey. And rainfall up to 97km from the core would be nearly 20 percent more intense.
Other computer modeling efforts have also predicted that hurricanes will grow stronger and wetter as a result of global warming. But this study is particularly significant, independent experts said, because it used half a dozen computer simulations of global climate, devised by separate groups at institutions around the world. The long-term trends it identifies are independent of the normal lulls and surges in hurricane activity that have been on display in recent decades.
The study was published online on Tuesday by The Journal of Climate and can be found at www.gfdl.noaa.gov/reference/bibliography/2004/tk0401.pdf.
The study's authors cautioned that it was too soon to know whether hurricanes would form more or less frequently in a warmer world. Even as seas warm, for example, accelerating high-level winds can shred the towering cloud formations of a tropical storm.
Experts also said that rising sea levels caused by global warming would lead to more flooding from hurricanes -- a point underlined at the UN this week by leaders of several small island nations, who pleaded for more attention to the potential for devastation from tidal surges.
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