Assessing long-term records of Atlantic hurricane activity

What is it about?

One of the biggest challenges for hurricane scientists is to predict how Atlantic hurricanes will respond to human-induced climate change during the 21st Century so that regional governments can prepare appropriate climate mitigation strategies. Climate models rely on meteorological records to understand how storm activity has responded to climate change since the mid 19th Century; however, natural archives are needed to detect changes in the variability of storms over longer time scales. To this end scientists analyse the geochemical, biological and physical properties of natural archives that respond to the passage of storms. Wallace et al. (2020) show for the first time that, during the last two millennia, the passage of storms across a submerged sinkhole in the Bahamas likely occurred by chance and that climate had no detectable influence on the frequency of storms at this site. This important finding means that scientists must not only revise previous interpretations of hurricane archives to take into account the influence of random processes on the course of storm tracks but also increase the density of study sites across the region before they attempt to tease out climate signals.

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Photo by NASA on Unsplash

Photo by NASA on Unsplash