11/12/2022 0 Comments Hurricane maria![]() A Harvard study put the number closer to 4,645. The official death toll after Hurricane Maria was declared, implausibly, to be just 64. Patches of city walls shone with the gloss of touch-up paint, half-covering graffiti reading "4,645"-a number that has become a sort of political rallying cry. The breeze was warm and ocean-licked, and colonial architecture struck my eye in bright pastels. In the streets of Old San Juan-where, just a month before my visit late last summer, hundreds of thousands of protesters had gathered to demand Governor Ricardo Rosselló's resignation-flowers and bright vines hung from balconies. Puerto Rico a joyful place: a quality hard-won through the resistance of its people. But of those that do, the floods are increased to some extent by climate change.From left: The pool at the century-old Condado Vanderbilt La Factoría's Hijos de Boriquen cocktail, made with rum, lemon, apricot liqueur, and cinnamon. "Not all storms have a large amount of inland flooding, of freshwater flooding. "Extreme precipitation during tropical cyclones has been increased by climate change," he said. Because so much of Maria's damage was due to flooding from the extreme amount of rain, it is safe to say that part of those damages were exacerbated by climate change, Wehner said. The findings show human influence on hurricane precipitation has already started to become evident, according to Michael Wehner, a climate scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, California, who was not connected to the new study. "Due to anthropogenic climate change it is now much more likely that we get these hurricanes that drop huge amounts of precipitation," Keellings said. But in 2017, that likelihood dropped to about once every 100 years, according to the study. They found an extreme event like Maria was 4.85 times more likely to happen in the climate of 2017 than in 1956, and that change in probability can't be explained by natural climate cycles.Īt the beginning of the observational record in the 1950s, a storm like Maria was likely to drop that much rain once every 300 years. To do so, they analyzed the likelihood of an event like Maria happening in the 1950s versus today. Keellings and Hernández Ayala also wanted to know whether Maria's extreme rain was a result of natural climate variability or longer-term trends like human-induced warming. Infrared satellite loop of Maria passing east of the Dominican Republic on September 21, after leaving Puerto Rico. The new study adds to the growing body of evidence that human-caused warming is making extreme weather events like these more common, according to the authors. Extreme rainfall during both storms caused unprecedented flooding that placed them among the top three costliest hurricanes on record (the other being Hurricane Katrina in 2005). Previous studies have attributed Hurricane Harvey's record rainfall to climate change, but no one had yet looked in depth at rainfall from Maria, which struck Puerto Rico less than a month after Harvey devastated Houston and the Gulf Coast. "What we found was that Maria's magnitude of peak precipitation is much more likely in the climate of 2017 when it happened versus the beginning of the record in 1950," said David Keellings, a geographer at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa and lead author of the new study in AGU's journal Geophysical Research Letters. A storm of Maria's magnitude is nearly five times more likely to form now than during the 1950s, an increase due largely to the effects of human-induced warming, according to the study's authors. A new study analyzing Puerto Rico's hurricane history finds 2017's Maria had the highest average rainfall of the 129 storms to have struck the island in the past 60 years. ![]()
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