Climate Change May Cause Extreme Storms to Strengthen and Weak Ones to Abate

As our world continues to warm, scientists are examining exactly what impacts this may have on weather. Now, scientists have found that the weather will be one of extremes; strong storms will become stronger while weak storms will become weaker.

"We know that with global warming we'll get more evaporation of the oceans," said Frederic Laliberte, one of the researchers, in a news release. "But circulation in the atmosphere is like a heat engine that requires fuel to do work, just like any combustion engine or a convection engine."

In order to better understand atmospheric circulation as a heat engine, the researchers borrowed techniques from oceanography and looked at observations and climate simulations. This allowed them to test global warming scenarios and measure the output of atmospheric circulation under warming conditions.

The atmosphere's work as a heat engine occurs when an air mass near the surface takes up water through evaporation as it is warmed by the sun and moves closer to the equator. The warmer the air mass is, the more water it takes up. As it reaches the equator, it begins to ascend through the atmosphere, where it cools. Then condensation occusr, which releases heat, and eventually a thunderstorm is produced. The ultimate output of this engine is the amount of heat and moister that's redistributed between the equator and the North and South Poles.

"We came up with an improved technique to comprehensively describe how air masses change as they move from the equator to the poles and back, which let us put a number on the energy efficiency of the atmospheric heat engine and measure its output," said Laliberte.

In the end, the researchers found that the increase in water vapor was making the process less efficient by evaporating water into air that is not already saturated with water vapor. This inefficiency limited the strengthening of atmospheric circulation, though not in a uniform manner.

In other words, they found that powerful storms are strengthened at the expense of weaker storms. However, there were the same number of storms overall. These findings may tell us exactly what we may be in for in terms of weather in the future as our climate continues to warm.

The findings are published in the journal Science.

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