Climate change likely to impact tropical weather patterns, studies show - wpde.com

Climate change likely to impact tropical weather patterns, studies show

(WPDE) — Climate change is altering many earth systems, including weather patterns both on land and over water. The challenge lies in understanding where those changes will most drastically occur within weather and climate systems.

To paint the picture, the atmosphere is layered like a cake. The troposphere is the layer in which almost all weather occurs, and even the troposphere has layers. How each layer of the atmosphere, both overall and in the troposphere, will respond to warming from human-caused climate change is uncertain. Each layer is likely to respond differently, and when you put the layers together, how each little change interacts with the other changes is hard to predict at this time.

Scientists are analyzing how a slight shift in certain layers could have a greater butterfly effect on certain weather events, and tropical weather is included in that conversation.

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Very certain ingredients are needed for a tropical system to grow and flourish into a tropical storm or hurricane, like low wind shear (a term used to describe wind speeds and directions as you go higher up in the troposphere), warm sea surface temperatures, and moisture.

In 2024, the Atlantic Basin has seen some very warm temperature anomalies in the main development region. The ocean absorbs and stores heat from the earth's systems, which in turn causes warming to occur in the ocean. As human-caused climate change continues to warm the planet, oceans will continue to get warmer.

With this ocean warming in mind, it leads to conclusions that tropical systems would thrive and become more frequent with consistent anomalous warming. However, this is not the case.

Circling back to the fact that many small changes lead to multiple possibilities under a warming climate, another ingredient of tropical systems could shift with climate change.

Studies show a likelihood of wind shear increasing over much of the Atlantic Basin's main development region. High wind shear breaks apart tropical systems, throwing off a key ingredient in tropical development.

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This means there is likely to be a decrease in the frequency of tropical storms and hurricanes in the Atlantic over time due to human-caused climate change.

The only caveat is there will still be pockets of low wind shear. This combined with warmer than normal sea surface temperatures and more moisture in the atmosphere, both due to human-caused climate change, mean there will be pockets with more than the right ingredients for tropical storm and hurricane formation.

In fact, if a tropical system finds one of these "sweet spots" with low wind shear, rapid intensification is more likely and so is the development of major hurricanes. So while the Atlantic is likely to see less overall tropical storms and hurricanes, the ones that do form are more likely to intensify and more likely to reach major hurricane status.

However, when it comes to landfall, it does not matter if there are more or less systems, more or less systems that intensify, or more or less major hurricanes. There is no way to predict where tropical systems will go through climate modeling.