“Over the past 37 years, typhoons that strike east and southeast Asia have intensified by 12-15 percent”, they wrote in the journal Nature Geoscience. Mei didn’t study why the water is warming, but said it is probably because of a combination of natural local weather phenomena and warming from the burning of fossil fuels.
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The unrelenting warming of coastal waters in the Pacific Ocean is giving birth to more powerful typhoons that have, during the course of the year, battered China, Japan and the rest of the Asian mainland.
Wei Mei, a tropical cyclone and climate researcher at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, said that he and his colleagues were curious if typhoons in some parts of the basin were intensifying more than others. “We believe the results are very important for East Asian countries because of the huge populations in these areas”.
While the intensity of a typhoon is determined based on the maximum wind speed it is able to sustain, the extent of damage it can cause, such as those brought on by high winds, storm surges and a high amount of rainfall, is known to increase disproportionately.
But as the world warms more in the future, stronger storms are likely to get even more intense, especially north of 20 degrees North latitude, where eastern China, Taiwan, Korea and Japan are located, Mei says.
Both “typhoon” and “hurricane” refer to rotating storm systems that form over tropical waters – the only difference is location.
Data links this intensification to sea surface temperature possibly caused by climate change.
Also, according to the researchers, the proportion of landfalling Category 4 or 5 storms, which are the most destructive of storms like Super Typhoon Haiyan that killed 6,300 people in the Philippines in 2013, has doubled in number.
Researchers looked at two different data sets to determine the intensity of the tropical storms from 1977 to 2015: the Joint Typhoon Warning Center managed by the US Navy and Air Force and the Japan Meteorological Agency. “People should be aware of the increase in typhoon intensity because when they make landfall these can cause much more damage”.
Currently, the global average sea surface temperature is almost 1 degree Fahrenheit higher than the 1971-2000 average.
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Scientists have struggled to identify changes in the intensity and frequency of typhoons over the north-western Pacific Ocean – never mind trying to pinpoint a role for global warming. He says there is a need to understand the change in intensity of these storms in order to prepare ourselves for future disasters.
