Only a few weeks after Hurricane Beryl tore through the Caribbean, Mexico and Texas, another tropical storm may be heading in the same direction, and an expert told Newsweek how climate change has affected hurricane season.
The National Hurricane Center is tracking a tropical disturbance in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean that could soon turn into a tropical depression in the coming days.
The seven-day forecast of the disturbance shows the storm potentially passing over Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, Haiti and Cuba, before possibly making landfall in Florida.
"An area of disturbed weather over the central tropical Atlantic Ocean is expected to interact with an approaching tropical wave during the next couple of days. Environmental conditions are forecast to become conducive for some development thereafter, and a tropical depression could form later this week while the system is in the vicinity of the Greater Antilles or the Bahamas," the NHC said in an Atlantic 7-Day Tropical Weather Outlook.
According to the NHC, there is a zero percent chance that the disturbance will develop into a tropical depression in the next 48 hours, but there is a 50 percent chance of it becoming a tropical depression in the next 7 days.
A tropical disturbance is an early, less organized stage of tropical cyclone development, lacking a well-defined center, while a tropical depression is a more organized weather system with a defined circulation and stronger winds.
Tropical disturbances like the one over the Atlantic generally have wind speeds below 23 mph, while tropical depressions have wind speeds between 23 mph and 38 mph. Between 39 mph and 73 mph, the system is considered a tropical storm, and after that point, it becomes a hurricane.
The Atlantic Hurricane season runs from June 1 to November 30 each year, due to the atmospheric conditions and Warm sea surface temperatures being ideal for storm formation. The season started with a bang with Hurricane Beryl, which broke records by becoming the earliest-ever Category 5 hurricane in the Atlantic and the first ever Category 4 storm recorded in June, hitting Category 4 strength by June 30 and climbing to Category 5 on July 1. Very few hurricanes usually occur during these early months of the season: only 6 percent of all tropical storms and 2 percent of hurricanes between 1851 and 2022 occurred in June.
The formation of thunderstorms and cyclones over the Atlantic has lulled in recent weeks, and may be due to the cloud of Saharan dust that is currently being blown across the ocean towards the Caribbean—this dust has recently been discovered to stunt hurricane formation by blocking out heat from the sun. This dust could play into the development of the tropical disturbance.
"There is some dry and dusty air that is over much of the Atlantic that could stop the development of this," Alan Reppert, a senior meteorologist at AccuWeather, told USA TODAY. "This system is still well east of the Leeward Islands so it still has several hundred miles until it even approaches where we're expecting this to at least try to develop."
However, once this cloud dissipates, Atlantic storms are expected to kick off in earnest.
"We did predict that there would be at least some break here until the early part of August when we start to see more chances and more threats for development," Reppert said.
As the effects of climate change take hold, increasing sea surface temperatures, raising sea levels and changing atmospheric circulation patterns, hurricanes are predicted to get more intense, with higher rainfall rates, and more powerful storm surges.
"In my view and that of most of the relevant scientific community, the evidence is quite compelling that tropical cyclones are getting stronger and producing more rain because of climate change," Adam Sobel, an atmospheric scientist at Columbia University, told Newsweek.
"Their frequency of occurrence has not been changing, except in the North Atlantic—the area relevant to the U.S. There, it has been increasing over the last 30 years, and I think the evidence suggests that this is in part a consequence of climate change, though the extent to which this is true and (if so) the responsible mechanisms remain areas of active debate."
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