Climate change fueled the fury of hurricanes Helene and Milton

Meteorologists have watched in awe as Hurricane Milton, churning over the anomalously warm waters within the Gulf of Mexico, rapidly transformed into one in every of the strongest Atlantic storms on record.

Over just 20 hours on October 7, Hurricane Milton explosively intensified from a Category 1 to a catastrophic Category 5 storm, with sustained winds of 290 kilometers per hour (A hundred and eighty miles per hour). The storm is anticipated to make landfall on the west coast of Florida either late on October 9 or early October 10 as a main Category Three or Four hurricane, bringing deadly storm surge and hurricane-force winds to coastal regions still reeling from Hurricane Helene just two weeks earlier (SN: 10/1/24).

The rapid intensifications of both storms were fueled by the Gulf’s extremely warm water. Developing tropical storms can suck up heat from warm seawater, dragging the humid air upward where it condenses, releasing that heat into the storm’s core. Because the storm moves forward, it pumps further and further water and heat into the air, and the spiraling winds will move faster and faster. Milton’s especially explosive rate of growth be linked to its relatively compact size, when put next with Helene (SN: 9/27/24).

Two separate reports published this week in finding that those warm Gulf waters were made hundreds of times more likely by human-caused climate change.

An analysis by the international World Weather Attribution, or WWA, initiative, released October 9, analyzed the role of climate change in contributing to Hurricane Helene’s intensification and its torrential rainfall, including as it moved inland across the Southern Appalachian Mountains.

Gulf of Mexico sea surface temperatures within the path of the storm were, on average, about 1.26 degrees Celsius (2.Three degrees Fahrenheit) warmer than they'd have been in a global without climate change, the WWA researchers found. Or, to place it some other way, the anomalously high temperatures along Helene’s path from development to landfall were made 200 to five hundred times more likely as a consequence of climate change.

Helene dumped as so much as 50 to seventy 5 centimeters of rain in some parts of Appalachia (20 to 30 inches), which resulted in flooding and hundreds of deaths across the U.S. Southeast. That rainfall, the researchers determined, was about 10 % heavier than it'd have been without human-caused climate change.

Climate Central, based in Princeton, N.J., contributed to the WWA’s sea surface temperature analysis for Helene. And, in a separate alert released October 7, Climate Central reported that elevated sea surface temperatures within the southwestern Gulf of Mexico were also at the back of the “explosive” expand in intensity of Hurricane Milton. The analysis found that the ocean surface temperatures within the Gulf were made Four hundred to 800 times more likely worldwide the last two weeks as a consequence of human-caused climate change.

That can most likely be an underestimate, the group notes. Generally, Climate Central uses on a on a daily basis basis sea surface temperatures collected by the U.S. National Centers for Environmental Information. Alternatively, Hurricane Helene’s impact has temporarily knocked out the NCEI data repository, based in Asheville, N.C.

So, to do the Milton analysis, Climate Central used sea surface temperature data obtained from the European Union’s Copernicus Marine Service. And folks data tend to run a little bit chillier, on average, than the NCEI data, says Orlando, Fla.–based climate scientist Daniel Gilford, of Climate Central.

“One of a couple of true messages [from both reports] is that climate change is here, occurring, at once,” Gilford says. “It influenced both of these storms. We all understand it’s to blame for these events attending to the extent that they did. And it truly is something dramatic. We should sit down up and take notice.”