By Adam Wagner
Raleigh - Global warming made Hurricane Florence wider and wetter, (click here) a study published this month in the journal Science Advances confirmed.
Days before Florence made landfall in September 2018, a team from Stony Brook University’s School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences compared 10 forecast ensembles to a hypothetically cooler world to determine that the actual storm would produce as much as 50% more rainfall and be about 50 miles wider than it would have been without a warmer climate.
After the storm, the team refined its methodology and ran 96 different ensembles, comparing forecasts under the actual conditions in which Florence developed to those of a world where the sea surface temperature near the Carolina coast was about 1.4 degrees Fahrenheit cooler. Those ensembles showed that Florence’s average rainfall increased about 4.9% in the warmer world, while the storm was about 5.6 miles — or 1.6% — wider than it would have been without warming, the researchers reported.
In a prepared statement, Kevin Reed, the Stony Brook professor who led the study, said, “We found predictions about increases in storm size and increased storm rainfall in certain areas to be accurate, even if the numbers and proportions are not exact. More importantly, this post-storm modeling around climate change illustrates that the impact of climate change on storms is here now and is not something only projected for our future.”
Slow-moving Florence dropped record-setting rain across Eastern North Carolina in September 2018, with the National Weather Service reporting local highs of nearly 36 inches in Elizabethtown and 34 inches in Swansboro. Flooding from the storm damaged an estimated 75,000 structures in North Carolina, including in many areas that suffered flooding during 2016’s Hurricane Matthew....
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THE NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE (click here) IN NEWPORT/MOREHEAD CITY NC HAS
CONFIRMED A TORNADO NEAR HAVELOCK IN CRAVEN COUNTY NORTH CAROLINA ON
THE EVENING OF SEP 13TH 2018. THE TORNADO WAS ASSOCIATED WITH
HURRICANE FLORENCE. A LARGE SWATH OF SNAPPED PINE TREES WERE FOUND
IN THE CHERRY BRANCH NEIGHBORHOOD OF HAVELOCK. THE DAMAGE WAS MOST
EXTENSIVE FROM NEAR THE DEAD END OF SEATTLE SLEW DRIVE SOUTHWEST
TOWARD THE INTERSECTION OF ROUTE 306 AND PINE CLIFF ROAD. OVER 100
PINE TREES WERE SNAPPED IN THIS GENERAL AREA, WITH A FEW PINE AND
HARDWOOD TREES UPROOTED NEAR BOTH ENDS OF THE DAMAGE PATH. MAXIMUM
ESTIMATED WINDS WERE 105 MPH.
