Is there a correlation between hurricanes and global warming? If so, what is it?

Answer 1

Yes and no. Hurricanes require energy in the form of heat. If the atmosphere and oceans are hotter, then there is more energy available for hurricanes. But global warming as we've seen it so far hasn't manifested itself as a temperature increase everywhere; some places are actually colder. Further, heat is a necessary, but, not the only "ingredient" when making a hurricane. Given all that, one would expect more frequent and more intense hurricanes as the planet's temperature increases.

Answer 2

Water temperatures. Hurricanes and other cyclonic storms feed off high sea surface temperatures, draw energy from the hot water, so to speak. My husband has this pretty fool-proof method of predicting where a hurricane is going to hit. He looks at sea surface temperatures. Where they are hottest is where the hurricane usually ends up.

Now, there are a number of factors for high water temperatures but since there has been a rising (temperature) trend since the 1950s, there is a direct link between global warming and the frequency and strength of hurricanes. Just because 2006 was a mild Atlantic season doesn't mean there weren't some very powerful and destructive storms elsewhere in the world. For example, the Phillippines alone got hit by 7 major typhoons in 2006, including 3 Super Typhoons...

Answer 3

In layman's mode ,yes there is a correlation , hurricanes are storms that are common in the warm waters of the Ecuador the air that blasts over this waters become heated and rise upwardly, the cooler air up higher is forced downwards in a sense they start to spiral in large areas , now with the global warming the waters are increasing in temperature so the air breezing by warmed up ocean are creating higher speeds of air that climb upwards and when the right conditions for a storm to develop, it becomes stronger hurricanes and stronger tornadoes over land which is basically the same process as the seas, so the correlation is that global warming effects the strength of the storms .

Answer 4

if you REALLY want to know, go to the National Hurricane Center's web site www.nhc.noaa.gov.

Hunt around for Chris Landsea's report on global warming and hurricanes.

Short answer is no correlation, but I leave it to you to find and draw your own conclusions.

Shorter answer is at NHC's site, look at the table for number of storms per decade.

Number of storms per decade going DOWN since 1940's.

How does that tie to global warming?Apparently not. An inconvenient truth, I'd say...