Hurricane Ian crashed into Florida’s coast on September 28th, the deadliest hurricane to strike the state since the 1935 Labor Day hurricane. The storm made landfall on the contiguous United States with winds approaching 150mph (240kph). It left Cuba after knocking out its power grid, and now around 2 million Floridians are without power. Are these storms getting worse, and is climate change to blame? 

In the North Atlantic, hurricane activity has increased in recent decades and storms have caused tens of billions of dollars of damage in the United States and the Caribbean. Hurricane Ian’s heavy rains and damaging floods have wreaked havoc on Florida’s houses and economy. The storm’s economic toll of insured losses could be between $53 billion and $74 billion, according to RMS, a Moody’s Analytics disaster-modeling firm.  

A hurricane requires four things to form- warm ocean water, lots of moisture in the air, low vertical wind shear (calm air), and a pre-existing disturbance, like a thunderstorm. Once a hurricane forms, scientists turn their attention to where it’s headed and its strength when it hits landfall.  

Modeling and predicting the effects of a hurricane is a difficult task with many moving parts. The impact of a hurricane revolves around both specific factors surrounding it and the large-scale changes in the Earth’s climate like El Nino and El Nina. Predicting these storms requires detailed models and data from past hurricanes.  

Physics suggests that warming waters will provide more fuel for hurricanes, giving them energy and making them stronger. Warmer air also has a larger capacity to carry rain. Coupled with rising sea levels, the destructive power of hurricanes will only increase with time as the earth warms. 

The best thing we people can do currently in areas with frequent hurricanes is to be prepared. As we gather more data on these storms, we’ll better understand whether models correctly predicted hurricane changes from human-caused global warming.