Is Climate Change Driving Monster Storms? Learn How Scientists Explore This Important and Complex Problem.

Hurricane Florence was bigger and wetter than we expected it to be. What started out as a tropical storm quickly became a Category 4 Hurricane that barged into the mid-Atlantic Coast of the United States, and produced an estimated 17 trillion gallons of rain!

Now that we are past the storm, and its remnants continue to bring rain as it moves north, we have to ask — could climate change be influencing the size and intensity of storms?

As Hurricane Florence took shape over the Atlantic Ocean, scientists used a wide array of research and computer tools to monitor it. Some even started to explore what it might have looked like if it had developed in a world where the climate had not been affected by human-created industrial activity for the past 100-years.

While there is still much to be learned about the impact of changes in climate on storm intensity and behavior, one trend is becoming very clear: our planet is heating up rapidly, as shown in this astonishing visualization from the Finnish Meteorological Society.

A group of researchers led by Dr. Kevin Reed at Stony Brook University in New York, used a computer climate model to estimate how different Hurricane Florence would have been without human-driven climate change. Their results were striking. They suggested that Hurricane Florence was as much as 80 km larger in size, and generated over 50% more rainfall, due to the effects of climate change.

How can we learn more about climate change and models?

Meet Dr. Jim Hack, Director of the National Center for Computational Sciences at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL)

Jim Hack and his team use supercomputers at ORNL to run complex climate models and forecast how Earth’s climate will respond to changes in atmospheric greenhouse-gas concentrations. These climate models can predict outcomes in the Earth’s system by inputting natural causes of climate change such as solar radiation, the distance between the earth and the sun, the axis that the earth is rotating, geography, topography, and inputs on human activities, such as levels of greenhouse gases. Results can show changes in air temperature, precipitation, or sea-surface temperature and forecast the weather. Scenarios are created to show what the future of the Earth’s climate can look like in the years to come.

Dr. Jim Hack is a featured STEM Role Model in JASON Learning’s climate change curriculum, Climate: Seas of Change

Learn more about climate models.

You can learn more about JASON Learning at www.jason.org