ORLANDO, Fla. – We have just concluded a prolific and fairly destructive hurricane season, especially for us Central Floridians.
Throughout the season, us meteorologists were faced with a plethora of forecast questions. The biggest heavy hitter of them all, “was this climate change?”
Released on Nov. 20, a new study with fact-checked and proven statistics seems to say yes. The bulk of the study lies in the anomalously warm sea surface temperatures, which a number of the tropical expert foundations heavily based their pre-season forecasts off.
The analysis and research has been ongoing since the year 2019. Most recently however, especially with the number of landfalls we incurred during the 2024 hurricane season, and the numerous breaks in the climatological “norm” for most of these systems, it does appear SOMETHING is changing across the Atlantic basin.
Let’s start with Hurricane Beryl. Beryl set the record for earliest hurricane, furthest east hurricane and earliest Category 5 storm beating the likes of Dennis and Emily of 2005.
Beryl emerged off the coast of Africa as a traditional easterly wave, or tropical wave as many of us are familiar with. These are the “seedlings” to tropical cyclones, and truthfully only about 60-65% of them actually develop during a calendar hurricane season.
A little more backstory about the tropical wave; historically and CLIMATOLOGICALLY speaking, they tend to receive a much favorable atmosphere by mid-August through to very early October. This is the chunk of the hurricane season we label as “Cabo Verde season,” when the freight train of healthy tropical waves begin to chug westward through the Atlantic headed either north or straight into the Caribbean Sea.
Beryl managed to beat just about every piece of Mother Nature working against it. Dry air in the Atlantic, strong shear at the highest parts of the atmosphere, and especially aggressive trade winds in the middle parts of the environment once it entered the Caribbean. A lot of that was primarily due to such hot ocean temps with which it traversed.
We had a few other powerful storms, like Helene and Kirk, one of which was the second hurricane landfall we faced here in the state of Florida. Then we saw Milton. Category 5 Hurricane Milton, which did not abide by any of the rules from the start to conclusion of its lifetime.
According to the research provided by Climate Central, the record warmth just within the Gulf of Mexico alone contributed to Milton’s twice-over rapid intensification to a whopping Category 5 storm with almost the smallest eye wall circumference in history. Especially given its close proximity to the Yucatan peninsula, traditionally any land interaction would work to disrupt the spin around a hurricane. Milton prevailed, until strong wind shear and cold front dry air started to squash it on final approach to Central Florida.
Floridians whole-heartedly dodged a major bullet...
In summary, Climate Central found on average, each landfalling hurricane was approximately 18 mph stronger than the “recorded norm” due to human-caused ocean warming. The link to the full story can be found here.
What does this mean going forward? Is it only the hurricane season that is potentially “changing?” Will we see it bleed over into other seasons, other local to large-scale weather phenomena, and when will this sudden changing of destructive weather features finally become the “new norm?”
Several questions remain up in the air, and only time will tell.
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