When juxtaposing the course of Hurricane Sally with that of past level 2 Hurricanes, such as Hurricane Arthur in 2014, which experienced a rainfall total of 4.60 feet, it is evident that Sally has an increased storm surge, or the ability to accumulate a plethora of water and cause more catastrophic flooding. While this may seem far-fetched, James Kossin, a researcher at the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, thinks otherwise. Kossin, along with his team of researchers, has been monitoring the courses of hurricanes for the past two years and identified an increasingly significant pattern: Hurricanes in the gulf coast were beginning to stall. Furthermore, his data suggest that the decrease in Hurricane speed sparked an increase in total rainfall accumulation, resulting in wetter storms. Now how is this all correlated? Kimberly Wood, a geoscientist at Mississippi State University, suggests that the stalling of storms causes it to linger over a place for a longer time, resulting in an increased accumulation of rainfall on a specific place: “A rain rate of, say, an inch an hour — that’s not so bad if the rain only lasts 30 minutes. But if it lasts for half a day, that adds up quickly.” In the context of Hurricane Sally, the slowdown of the jet stream caused Sally to move 3 miles per hour, thus bringing about a torrential amount of rain. This may all seem like a natural coincidence when considering the fact that wind speeds aren’t always predictable. However, researchers have found the impetus of this natural occasion: climate change. The increase in storm surge is not something that an average person would know about, but rather the fact that the warming of our planet melts the polar ice caps, resulting in an increase in sea level. The melting of the polar ice caps, however, is the foundational cause for these increased storm surges: higher temperatures lead to the warming of polar ice caps, thus resulting in a minimal difference in the temperatures of the polar and tropical regions, thus resulting in a slowdown of jet streams and the slowdown of hurricanes. Hurricanes, therefore, are a looming threat, along with the rise in annual temperatures, that remind us that climate change is on the rise, and implores us to take action to limit our carbon footprint to prevent not just the problem of storm surge, but the plethora of other problems associated with climate change as well.
Sources: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/16/climate/hurricane-sally-climate-change.html https://www.insurancejournal.com/news/southeast/2020/09/18/583121.htm https://www.medicinenet.com/script/main/art.asp?articlekey=38906 https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/features/GlobalWarming/page2.php
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8/1/2022 09:14:12 pm
Instagram takipçi satın almak artık hem hızlı hem de kolay. 7 24 aktif adresimizde sizler için kusursuz paketler yer alıyor. Daha fazlası için adresimizi ziyaret edebilirsiniz.
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