Attribution of 2020 hurricane season extreme rainfall to human-induced climate change

Kevin A. Reed (), Michael F. Wehner and Colin M. Zarzycki
Additional contact information
Kevin A. Reed: Stony Brook University
Michael F. Wehner: Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
Colin M. Zarzycki: Pennsylvania State University

Nature Communications, 2022, vol. 13, issue 1, 1-6

Abstract: Abstract The 2020 North Atlantic hurricane season was one of the most active on record, causing heavy rains, strong storm surges, and high winds. Human activities continue to increase the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, resulting in an increase of more than 1 °C in the global average surface temperature in 2020 compared to 1850. This increase in temperature led to increases in sea surface temperature in the North Atlantic basin of 0.4–0.9 °C during the 2020 hurricane season. Here we show that human-induced climate change increased the extreme 3-hourly storm rainfall rates and extreme 3-day accumulated rainfall amounts during the full 2020 hurricane season for observed storms that are at least tropical storm strength (>18 m/s) by 10 and 5%, respectively. When focusing on hurricane strength storms (>33 m/s), extreme 3-hourly rainfall rates and extreme 3-day accumulated rainfall amounts increase by 11 and 8%, respectively.

Date: 2022
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-022-29379-1 Abstract (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:natcom:v:13:y:2022:i:1:d:10.1038_s41467-022-29379-1

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/ncomms/

DOI: 10.1038/s41467-022-29379-1

Access Statistics for this article

Nature Communications is currently edited by Nathalie Le Bot, Enda Bergin and Fiona Gillespie

More articles in Nature Communications from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().