Carbon particulates increase tropical hurricane strength

From The Carbon Wars

Powerful tropical hurricanes, more commonly known as cyclones, like the super typhoon that lashed Taiwan with 150-mile-per-hour winds last week and then flooded parts of China, are expected to become even stronger as the planet warms.

So far, the warming effects of greenhouse gases on tropical cyclones have been masked, in part by air pollution.

Over the past century tiny airborne particles called aerosols, which cool the climate by absorbing and reflecting sunlight, largely cancelled out the effects of planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions when it came to tropical storm intensity, according to a new scientific review paper published this week in the journal Science. That might sound like a good thing, but many of those carbon particles came from the burning of fossil fuels and wood, and contributed to acid rain, smog and lung damage. As vehicles and power plants added filters and scrubbers to reduce their impact on human health, levels of man-made carbon particulates in the atmosphere began to decline. At the same time, greenhouse gas concentrations continued to rise.

That compensating effect won’t continue if greenhouse gas warming keeps increasing. Using model simulations, they provide new calculations of the cancelling effects of aerosols and greenhouse gases on tropical cyclones worldwide. They also take a closer look at the still-developing understanding of how climate change will affect tropical cyclones, also known regionally as typhoons or hurricanes.

“The fact that global warming’s fingerprints don’t yet jump out at us when we look at hurricanes isn’t surprising – it’s what current science tells us we should expect,” said lead author Adam Sobel, a professor at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory and School of Engineering. “The same science tells us that those fingerprints will show up eventually in more ultra-powerful storms.”

Many factors contribute to a tropical cyclone’s intensity. At the most basic, the storm’s convective strength – the boiling motion of air rising from the ocean surface to the atmosphere – depends on the temperature difference between the surface ocean and the upper atmosphere. Computer models that simulate the physics of tropical cyclones suggest that this difference should increase as the climate and sea surface temperatures warm, and that tropical storm strength should increase with it.

We have seen harbingers of that change in recent years: Typhoon Haiyan, also known as Yolanda, killed more than 6,300 people as it devastated parts of the Philippines as a Category 5 storm in 2013. Last year, Hurricane Patricia became the second most-intense tropical cyclone on record when its sustained winds reached 215 mph before weakening to hit Mexico with winds still powerful at 150 mph.

For more: http://www.thecarbonwars.com/carbon-particulates-increase-tropical-hurricane-strength/

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