TY - JOUR
T1 - Attribution of 2020 hurricane season extreme rainfall to human-induced climate change
AU - Reed, Kevin A.
AU - Wehner, Michael F.
AU - Zarzycki, Colin M.
N1 - Funding Information:
This work was partially supported by the Stony Brook Foundation’s Minghua Zhang Early Career Faculty Innovation Fund, the Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Science award number DE-SC0016605 “A Framework for Improving Analysis and Modeling of Earth System and Intersectoral Dynamics at Regional Scales,” and at LBNL by the Director, DOE Office of Science, DOE Office of Biological and Environmental Research under Contract No. DE340AC02-05CH11231. We would like to acknowledge high-performance computing support from Cheyenne (doi:10.5065/D6RX99HX) provided by NCAR’s Computational and Information Systems Laboratory, sponsored by the NSF.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2022, The Author(s).
PY - 2022/12
Y1 - 2022/12
N2 - The 2020 North Atlantic hurricane season was one of the most active on record, causing heavy rains, strong storm surges, and high winds. Human activities continue to increase the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, resulting in an increase of more than 1 °C in the global average surface temperature in 2020 compared to 1850. This increase in temperature led to increases in sea surface temperature in the North Atlantic basin of 0.4–0.9 °C during the 2020 hurricane season. Here we show that human-induced climate change increased the extreme 3-hourly storm rainfall rates and extreme 3-day accumulated rainfall amounts during the full 2020 hurricane season for observed storms that are at least tropical storm strength (>18 m/s) by 10 and 5%, respectively. When focusing on hurricane strength storms (>33 m/s), extreme 3-hourly rainfall rates and extreme 3-day accumulated rainfall amounts increase by 11 and 8%, respectively.
AB - The 2020 North Atlantic hurricane season was one of the most active on record, causing heavy rains, strong storm surges, and high winds. Human activities continue to increase the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, resulting in an increase of more than 1 °C in the global average surface temperature in 2020 compared to 1850. This increase in temperature led to increases in sea surface temperature in the North Atlantic basin of 0.4–0.9 °C during the 2020 hurricane season. Here we show that human-induced climate change increased the extreme 3-hourly storm rainfall rates and extreme 3-day accumulated rainfall amounts during the full 2020 hurricane season for observed storms that are at least tropical storm strength (>18 m/s) by 10 and 5%, respectively. When focusing on hurricane strength storms (>33 m/s), extreme 3-hourly rainfall rates and extreme 3-day accumulated rainfall amounts increase by 11 and 8%, respectively.
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U2 - 10.1038/s41467-022-29379-1
DO - 10.1038/s41467-022-29379-1
M3 - Article
C2 - 35414063
AN - SCOPUS:85128115664
SN - 2041-1723
VL - 13
JO - Nature Communications
JF - Nature Communications
IS - 1
M1 - 1905
ER -