A new study has found that climate change will bring more hurricanes to midlatitude regions, which include populated areas like New York, Boston, Tokyo, and Shanghai.
In the peer-reviewed British journal Nature Geoscience, the researchers revealed that tropical cyclones, commonly known as hurricanes or typhoons, will expand out of the tropical regions where they are currently common.
The conditions that cause storms will become more common farther north in the northern hemisphere and farther south in the southern hemisphere as a result of global warming.
Hurricanes would develop in a wider variety of latitudes in the 21st century than they have in the last three million years, according to the lead author of the research, Joshua Studholme, a physicist in Yale's Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, in a news release.
"This represents an important, under-estimated risk of climate change," Studholme said.
Because the majority of the world's major cities are located in midlatitude zones, the more widespread hurricanes will have the potential to cause significantly more damage.
Some hurricanes have already made landfall in areas that are becoming increasingly vulnerable. Subtropical Storm Alpha made landfall in Portugal in 2020, the first time a subtropical or tropical cyclone has ever made landfall in the Western European country.
The Hadley cells, a global wind pattern in which air moves poleward at a height of about 6 to 9 miles but returns toward the equator as it drops toward ground level, is responsible for the shift in hurricane latitudes.
A decrease in the difference between surface temperatures close and distant from the equator is one result of climate change. Because of feedback loops such as melting sea ice, loss of snow cover, and thawing permafrost, warming happens more rapidly at higher latitudes, causing even more heat.
However, in the tropics, air at higher altitudes heats faster. Hurricanes can reach higher latitudes when the jet stream is moving northward in the northern hemisphere, which normally prevents them from moving further north.
While a rise in tropical cyclones is usually touted as a sign of climate change, the authors emphasize that much remains unknown about how sensitive they are to the planet's average temperature.
In the last 150 years, average global temperatures have risen 1.2 degrees Celsius (2.2 Fahrenheit), faster than at any other time in recorded history. The extent to which the Earth warms more in the next 80 years might vary by several degrees, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, depending on how much greenhouse gases that cause warming are generated.
