Hurricanes in the Atlantic and the Pacific have become noticeably more dangerous to humans and nature in recent years due to the fact that global warming has dramatically reduced the speed of their movement, according to the journal Nature.

"The main conclusion of our work is that the speed of movement of tropical cyclones over water and land decreased by 20% in the Atlantic, 30% in the North-West Pacific and 19% off the coast of Australia. As a result, rainfall has increased and floods have become more extreme. All this is deadly for people, " said James Kossin (James Kossin) from the NOAA weather and climate Center in Madison (USA).

Over the past two years, the shores of North America have been constantly "bombarded" by powerful hurricanes, causing enormous economic damage to coastal cities and villages in America and causing great problems for populations of some rare animals, such as monarch butterflies. Only in August and September last year in the Atlantic there were just four powerful hurricanes of the fourth and fifth categories of danger, Harvey, Irma, Jose and Maria, who left the island of Puerto Rico without electricity and created a potentially catastrophic situation on the Atlantic coast of the United States and Mexico.

Kossin found out why tropical hurricanes and associated floods have become so destructive in recent years, analyzing how global warming and related phenomena, including rising air and water surface temperatures, have affected the behavior of typical Atlantic and Pacific cyclones.Studying the hurricanes that raged in the waters of the two oceans from 1949 to 2016, the scientist noticed that the speed of their movement gradually fell as the movement from the past to the present, generally decreasing by about 10% across the Earth.

After analyzing the changes in the character of the movement of the winds and the storms in each of the regions, the climate scientist concluded that this occurred through the "fault" of global warming.His calculations show that the increase in water and air temperature has led to the fact that the wind, "conducting" migrations of hurricanes, noticeably weakened and began to move at a slower speed than before. Together with them, the cyclones themselves slowed down. As the climatologist explains, a decrease in the speed of the hurricane even by 10% leads to catastrophic consequences – the typical level of precipitation doubles, and the probability of occurrence of floods increases by several orders of magnitude.

In addition, the decrease in the speed of the cyclone causes another dangerous phenomenon-due to the weakening of the "conducting" winds, the hurricane often changes the direction of "flight" and periodically returns back, which causes another series of destruction in the already flooded regions. Something similar, as Kossin notes, happened in Texas with hurricane Harvey. In the future, according To kossin's forecasts, the situation will be even more difficult.

Now the average annual temperature on Earth is only 0.5 degrees higher than in the middle of the last century, while by the end of this century they can grow by 1.5-3 degrees. As a result, hurricanes will become even slower and longer-lived, making them even more destructive than they have become in recent years.