Climate change has caused an increase of between 5% and 10% in rainfall during the 2020 North Atlantic cyclone season, according to a study published on Tuesday.
During the season, a total of 30 storms and hurricanes were recorded, a record that left experts without names to name these meteorological phenomena, for the second time in history.
Twelve storms or hurricanes made landfall in the United States and caused tens of billions of dollars in damage.
The authors of the study, published in the journal Nature, compared the rainfall generated during these meteorological episodes with models that supposedly indicate the amount of rain that would have fallen without climate change.
“The main conclusion of our study is that human-induced climate change has increased the extreme rainfall associated with the hurricane season by between 5% and 10%,” lead author Kevin Reed of Stony Brook University in the US told AFP. United.
The study particularly looks at rain episodes over a short period of time and continuous (less intense) rain over a longer period.
Globally, for the entire cyclonic season, climate change increased the amount of rain that fell on the three worst days by 5% and the amount of rain that fell in the three heaviest hours by 10%, compared to available data from 1850.
The numbers “are not surprising” considering that the concentration of moisture in the atmosphere increases by 7% per degree Celsius, the study explains.
In the case of hurricanes, the impact of climate change is even more pronounced, with an increase of 8% (in the three days of greatest precipitation) and 11% (in the three hours with the worst records), which means “almost twice as much” than expected by scientists.
Storms and hurricanes are formed by the combination of humidity and sea surface temperature.
Most of these storms formed in 2020, when the temperature in the North Atlantic was higher than 27ºC, that is, between 0.4ºC and 0.9ºC higher than in the pre-industrial era.
Because of greenhouse gas emissions, the planet’s average temperature has increased by approximately +1.1°C compared to the pre-industrial era.
