The Washington Post speaks to MIT meteorologist Kerry Emanuel, who dissects the climate science behind a recent tropical cyclone.
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By Angela Fritz | The Washington Post
Late last week, one of the strongest tropical cyclones on record in the South Pacific made a direct hit on the island nation of Vanuatu, leaving more than 20 people dead and massive destruction in its wake.
Tropical Cyclone Pam’s sustained winds of 165 mph and gusts nearing 200 ripped trees from the ground and flattened homes. In the course of a day, Tropical Cyclone Pam intensified from the equivalent of a category 2 hurricane to a category 4, before going on to become just the second category 5 on record to directly hit an island in the South Pacific. At the time, Pam was the strongest of four concurrent cyclones in the western Pacific and Indian oceans.
It was “one of the largest and most intense cyclones” the region has seen, says Greg Holland, a senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research who has specialized in South Pacific tropical storms. “Taken together I have not seen a storm with higher damage potential in the region,” Holland told The Washington Post, “and this shows in the extensive damage that Vanuatu has suffered.”
Now, as the death toll grows and the people of Vanuatu pick up the pieces of their devastated lives, scientists are pondering what role Earth’s changing climate may have had in the destructive potential of the storm.
In a post on the climate science blog RealClimate, MIT meteorologist Kerry Emanuel dissects the science embodied in the question, coming to the conclusion that “while Pam and Haiyan, as well as other recent tropical cyclone disasters, cannot be uniquely pinned on global warming, they have no doubt been influenced by natural and anthropogenic climate change and they do remind us of our continuing vulnerability to such storms.”