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Top Ten Tropical Cyclone Events of 2016 Possibly Influenced by Climate Change
From Dr. Jeff Masters Category 6 blog at Weather Underground: Top Ten Tropical Cyclone Events of 2016 Potentially Influenced by Climate Change:
Tropical cyclones—which include all hurricanes, typhoons, tropical storms and tropical depressions—are expected to change in intensity, frequency, location, and seasonality as a result of climate change. Many of the tropical cyclones of 2016 exhibited the type of behavior we expect to see more of due to global warming. Here, then, is a “top ten” list of 2016 tropical cyclone events of the type we should expect to see more of due to global warming.
Examples of the strongest storms getting stronger
Tropical cyclones are heat engines which extract heat energy from the oceans and convert it to the kinetic energy of the storms' winds. Thus, the strongest tropical cyclones are expected to get stronger in a world with warmer oceans. It was not a surprise that in 2016—a year with the warmest ocean temperatures on record, globally—we saw the strongest storms ever observed in the two of the six ocean basins that tropical cyclones commonly occur in. If we include the Northern Hemisphere’s strongest tropical cyclone on record—Hurricane Patrica of October 2015—records have been set in three of the six ocean basins over the past two years. The two all-time record storms in 2016 were Tropical Cyclone Winston in the South Pacific (180 mph winds, tied for strongest Southern Hemisphere storm on record) and Tropical Cyclone Fantala in the South Indian Ocean (175 mph winds.) This year also saw seven Category 5 storms, which was the fifth greatest on record (since 1990.)
Tropical cyclones are heat engines which extract heat energy from the oceans and convert it to the kinetic energy of the storms' winds. Thus, the strongest tropical cyclones are expected to get stronger in a world with warmer oceans. It was not a surprise that in 2016—a year with the warmest ocean temperatures on record, globally—we saw the strongest storms ever observed in the two of the six ocean basins that tropical cyclones commonly occur in. If we include the Northern Hemisphere’s strongest tropical cyclone on record—Hurricane Patrica of October 2015—records have been set in three of the six ocean basins over the past two years. The two all-time record storms in 2016 were Tropical Cyclone Winston in the South Pacific (180 mph winds, tied for strongest Southern Hemisphere storm on record) and Tropical Cyclone Fantala in the South Indian Ocean (175 mph winds.) This year also saw seven Category 5 storms, which was the fifth greatest on record (since 1990.)
Figure 1. Global Category 5 tropical cyclones from 1990 - 2016, as rated by NOAA's National Hurricane Center and the U.S. Navy's Joint Typhoon Warning Center. This time series is too short to make definitive conclusions about how climate change may be affecting these storms, though the past three years have had the highest 3-year total of Category 5 storms on record. The seven Category 5 storms of 2016 was the fifth highest yearly total on record.
There are some incredible satellite images of tropical storms included with the article. Here is Tropical Cyclone Fantala collected at 1025Z (6:25 am EDT) on April 18, 2016, by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) sensor on board the Aqua satellite. The north tip of Madagascar can be seen at bottom.
