HurricanesHurricane risk to Northeast U.S. coast increasing

New research suggests the Northeastern coast of the United States could be struck by more frequent and more powerful hurricanes in the future due to shifting weather patterns caused by manmade industrial emissions.

A new collaborative study, led by researchers at Durham University, U.K., and the University of New Mexico and published in the journal Scientific Reports, found hurricanes have gradually moved north from the western Caribbean towards North America over the past several hundred years.

The researchers, including co-authors Lisa and James Baldini from Durham University and Professors Yemane Asmerom and Keith Prufer from UNM, suggest the change in the hurricane track is caused by the expansion of atmospheric circulation belts driven by increasing carbon dioxide emissions.

Major cities along the Northeast coast could come under increased threat from these severe storms and need to be better prepared for their potential impact, the researchers said.

The researchers reconstructed hurricane rainfall for the western Caribbean dating back 450 years by analyzing the chemical composition of a stalagmite collected from Yok Balum a cave in southern Belize, Central America.

UNM says that they found that the average number of hurricanes at the Belize site decreased during that time. When combined with other data from places such as Bermuda and Florida, this information showed that hurricanes were moving north rather than decreasing in total number across the North Atlantic. 

Although natural warming over the centuries has had some impact on shifting hurricane tracks, the researchers found a marked decrease in hurricane activity in the western Caribbean coinciding with the late 19th Century industrial boom associated with increasing carbon dioxide and sulphate aerosol emissions into the atmosphere.

The researchers said that cooling of the Northern Hemisphere due to increased industrial aerosol emissions should have pushed the hurricane tracks southward since Industrialization.

“We are able to show changing storm trajectories that correlate with anthropogenic influences on climate systems since the industrial revolution,” said Asmerom, a professor in UNM’s Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences. “This is facilitated by two important analytical aspects of the project: the development of a proxy for tropical cyclone (hurricane) events in the past using very high resolution carbon and oxygen isotope records, matched by few other such records derived from a tropical stalagmite and the incredibly precise age model.”