Is the mother of all hurricanes about to hit the US?

 

Just days after the US marked the 10th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, the most destructive storm of its kind ever to make landfall in the States, scientists warn that there’s a possibility that even stronger storms could be on the way.

Dr. Ning Lin, a civil and environmental engineer from the University of Princeton, and Kerry Emanuel, a professor of meteorology at MIT, reported Monday in the journal, Nature Climate Change, that Tampa, Florida is one of three cities that could be hit by a theoretical storm they refer to as a “gray swan” – a rare, highly-destructive but predictable tropical cyclone.

Tampa, along with Cairns, Australia and Dubai, United Arab Emirates, currently face a “larger-than-expected” threat of grey swan tropical cyclones, and those events could trigger storm surges of between four- to six-meters in size, the Washington Post said.

While the odds of these storms occurring are currently as little as 1-in-10,000, climate change could increase the chances, especially towards the end of the century. Not only that, but global warming could cause these “gray swan” cyclones to become more intense as well, with surges potentially exceeding 11 meters in Tampa and 7 meters in Dubai possibly by 2100.

Be prepared, but don’t panic just yet

If this sounds like a catastrophic, doom-and-gloom disaster movie scenario waiting to happen, the authors told the Post that there is no need to panic just yet. The purpose of the research, said Emanuel, was use mathematical calculations and computer models “to raise awareness of what a very low probability, very high impact hurricane event might look like.”

Their simulations generated grey swan storms that combined a high-resolution hurricane model with a global climate model, allowing them to create a simulated world filled with a vast array of different types of storms. By creating hundreds of thousands of storm events, Emanuel said that the researchers ensured that they would be creating “hurricanes that are unlike anything you’ve seen in history.”

Previous research conducted by Emanuel found that a theoretical “hypercane” with winds nearing 500 miles per hour is possible in scenarios where an asteroid hits the Earth, causing the ocean waters to heat far beyond normal temperatures, the Post said. As was the case with that scenario, the possibly of a highly-destructive grey swan storm decimating Tampa or any other city is extremely rare, but the research clearly shows that the possibility does exist.

“A storm surge of 5 meters is about 17 feet, which would put most of Tampa underwater, even before the sea level rises there,” Emanuel told the Daily Mail, adding that the Florida city has not experienced a large hurricane since 1921. “Tampa needs to have a good evacuation plan, and I don’t know if they’re really that aware of the risks they actually face.”

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Feature image: Hurricane Katrina from space. Credit: NASA.