Hurricanes have trended stronger over the past 40 years

New research from NOAA and the University of Wisconsin-Madison indicates that tropical cyclones have trended stronger globally over the past 40 years. This is in line with earlier research that predicted that climate change would lead to stronger hurricanes and typhoons.

The research team found that maximum sustained winds are getting stronger, which is likely due to the warming planet.

The study, which was led by Dr. James Kossin, a NOAA scientist from the University of Wisconsin at Madison, looked at global hurricane data from 1979-2017. The data included the Dvorak technique, which relies on infrared temperature measurements from satellites to measure tropical cyclone intensity.

Key excerpt from the University of Wisconsin-Madison News....

“Our results show that these storms have become stronger on global and regional levels, which is consistent with expectations of how hurricanes respond to a warming world,” says Kossin. “It’s a good step forward and increases our confidence that global warming has made hurricanes stronger, but our results don’t tell us precisely how much of the trends are caused by human activities and how much may be just natural variability.”

Kossin is also well known for his earlier research which found that hurricanes are traveling more north and south (2014 study), and that hurricanes are moving more slowly across land, which has increased the risk of major flooding (2018 study).

This peer-reviewed study was recently published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.