Climate change intensified Hurricane Helene’s rainfall and winds, amplifying its devastation, a new rapid analysis found.
The Gulf of Mexico has been abnormally warm, which helped turn Helene into the deadliest hurricane to hit the US mainland in nearly two decades. Burning fossil fuels made that extra ocean heat up to 500 times more likely, according to the analysis published by the World Weather Attribution group that studies extreme weather for evidence of climate change. In addition, Helene brought 10% more rain and saw its winds at landfall ramped up by 11% due to the influence of a hotter atmosphere.
Helene traversed the Gulf before making landfall in Florida roughly two weeks ago. The storm moved inland where it dumped record rainfall, creating an ongoing humanitarian crisis in North Carolina. The extreme flooding Helene unleashed destroyed critical infrastructure, hampering disaster response.
The economic losses could be as high as $250 billion, according to AccuWeather, and insurance losses are expected to reach $6.4 billion. The report’s authors warn that climate change boosted the damage and loss of life caused by Helene. With Hurricane Milton set to make landfall in Florida on Wednesday after strengthening explosively over the Gulf of Mexico, the US is slated to see billions more in losses.
“The heat that human activities are adding to the atmosphere and oceans is like steroids for hurricanes,” Bernadette Woods Placky, the chief meteorologist at Climate Central and one of 21 researchers who conducted the study, said in a statement. “If humans keep heating the climate, we will keep seeing storms rapidly morph into monster hurricanes, leading to more destruction.”
Hurricanes as intense as Helene are likely to hit the Southeast US more frequently, too. In a pre-industrial climate, a storm like Helene had one-in-130-year odds of occurring in a given year. Now, warming temperatures have made it so that a storm of that magnitude will make landfall about every half century on average, according to the WWA analysis. The report isn’t peer reviewed, though it relied on methods that are to reach its conclusions.
In recent decades, storms have strengthened more rapidly due to oceans warmed in part by climate change. Though the added heat hasn’t made hurricanes more frequent, the ones that strike are likely to do so with more intensity, said Suzana Camargo, a climate scientist at Columbia University.
“What’s happened is exactly what we have been talking about, at this point, for decades: to expect in a warmer world to have these more intense hurricanes,” Camargo said.
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