Hurricane Erin is whipping up the Atlantic Ocean at speeds over 100 miles per hour. The trajectory of the storm has it staying out to sea, though many effects will be felt close to shore and on land. And some of those effects are made worse by global warming.
Overnight on Friday, Hurricane Erin ratcheted up to a Category 5 storm, from a Category 1, becoming one of the top five most quickly intensifying hurricanes on record. As the planet warms, scientists say that rapidly intensifying hurricanes are becoming ever more likely.
“It’s a very easy set of dots to connect,” said Jim Kossin, who worked at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration as a hurricane specialist and climate scientist before he retired. “These rapid intensification events are linked pretty directly to that human fingerprint.”
According to the National Hurricane Center, rapid intensification is an increase in a storm’s sustained wind speeds of at least 35 miles per hour in a 24-hour period. Between Friday morning and Saturday morning, Hurricane Erin’s wind speeds increased by nearly 85 miles per hour, peaking at 161 mph.
Daniel Gilford, a climate scientist at Climate Central, a science communication nonprofit, likens hurricanes to the engine of a car. “They need some fuel source in order to spin, and the fuel source is the ocean surface,” he said. “So as the temperature of the ocean surface goes up, that adds more fuel that these storms can use to intensify.”
For over a century, greenhouse gases emitted by human activity have trapped heat inside the planet’s atmosphere. A recent streak of record-breaking temperatures crowned 2024 as the hottest year on record.
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