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  • 7 hours ago
Meteorologist explains how global warming has intensified Hurricane MelissaAP
Transcript
00:00With Melissa, what is happening is that that part of the Atlantic is at the moment very warm.
00:05The sea surface temperature there is around 30 degrees, which is two or three degrees above normal.
00:10And not just the top layer of the sea, but layers below the top level are also quite warm.
00:15At the same time, the atmosphere is very conducive because there is no this kind of wind resistance for the development of Melissa.
00:22And if you have a warm sea, no resistance in the atmosphere and no resistance from the kind of land areas around by,
00:30then that is a green signal for any hurricane like Melissa to intensify rapidly.
00:37See, global warming is doing one basic thing, which is that it is increasing the air temperature and also making oceans warm.
00:46And because we are dumping quite a lot of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, this is how oceans are also getting warmer.
00:51And if an ocean is very warm, like I said, you know, it is going to just supply a lot of energy to any tropical storm or a hurricane over the ocean.
01:01So over 90 percent of the extra heat that we trap in our Earth system goes into the oceans.
01:13And what that means is that our oceans are warming up.
01:16It plays out in many different ways, one of them being more fuel for these storms to intensify more rapidly.
01:22And that is what we're seeing with climate change.
01:32However, when this storm suddenly goes from being a category one to a category four or five in the course of one day,
01:40that changes everything you need to do to prepare for these coastal communities.
01:46And some of them you can't evacuate everyone in a day, especially islands when you have to fly people out.
01:51So our risk is dramatically changing with climate change for these coastal storms and these coastal communities.
01:57That's one of them.
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