Last updated on August 29th, 2024 at 04:42 am
SINGAPORE – Climate change is shifting global rainfall patterns, which may be amplifying typhoons and other tropical cyclones, scientists said in a paper published on Friday. This week, Taiwan, the Philippines, and China were battered by the year’s most powerful typhoon, forcing the closure of schools, businesses, and financial markets as winds howled at as high as 227 kph. Hundreds of thousands were evacuated in eastern China as the typhoon approached landfall on Thursday.
A team of researchers led by Zhang Wenxia from the China Academy of Sciences looked at historical meteorological data and found that about 75% of the world’s landmass has been experiencing increased “precipitation variability”-that is, wider swings between wet and dry conditions. In a paper published in the journal Science, the research team speculates that with rising temperatures extend the atmosphere’s capacity to hold moisture, leading to more wild swings in rainfall.
Fewer but More Intense Storms
Scientists think that climate change also influences the behavior of tropical storms as less frequent but much stronger.
Typhoon Gaemi, which hit Taiwan on Wednesday, was the strongest to reach land there in eight years. Because individual weather events can’t be tied directly to climate change, though models indicate that global warming would make typhoons stronger, said Sachie Kanada, a researcher at Nagoya University in Japan.
While the number of typhoons in the Northwest Pacific and the South China Sea has sharply decreased since the 1990s, those that do come are getting stronger, according to China’s just-released “blue paper” on climate change. A similar finding was provided by Taiwan’s climate change report published this May: while the total number of typhoons may decline, their intensity is likely to increase.
Feng Xiangbo, a researcher in the tropical cyclone at the University of Reading, explains this trend of fewer typhoons due to unequal ocean warming. The capacity of the lower atmosphere to hold water vapor will increase by 7 percent for every 1 degree Celsius increase in temperatures, and rainfall from tropical cyclones in the United States may increase by 40 percent or more for each single degree of temperature rise.