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With hundreds still missing and the death toll rising in the wake of Hurricane Helene, NBC News thought it helpful to report on the role climate change played in the destruction.

“Two rapid-attribution studies released Tuesday found that human-caused global warming made Hurricane Helene stronger and wetter, elements that contributed to the storm’s destructive power,” the report noted, citing analysis from ClimaMeter and the Lawrence Berkeley Lab in California.

ClimaMeter, which is described on its website as “a rapid experimental framework for putting weather extremes in a climate perspective,” found that the elements of the deadly storm were “mostly strengthened by human-driven climate change.”

Hurricane Helene made landfall on September 26th, hitting Florida’s Big Bend as a category 4 hurricane, spawning tornadoes and creating historic-level storm surges as it barreled its way through parts of Georgia, Tennessee, and the Carolinas, claiming more than 130 lives.

Meteorologist and NBC national climate reporter CHase Cain delivered his thorough take on the connection.

The ClimaMeter study noted that “it is likely that the unusually high heat content in the Gulf of Mexico has contributed to both Helen’s (sic) rapid intensification and the exceptional atmospheric river that caused extreme floods over the South-Eastern US.”

“For this event, we have low confidence in the robustness of our approach given the available climate data, as the event is largely unique in the data record,” the consortium pointed out. “Moreover, the analogs approach does not guarantee that the identified past events do actually correspond to tropical cyclones.”

The Lawrence Berkeley Lab report claimed that “Climate change may have caused as much as 50% more rainfall during Hurricane Helene in some parts of Georgia and the Carolinas.”

“Furthermore, we estimate that the observed rainfall was made up to 20 times more likely in these areas because of global warming,” the report stated. “As the wettest regions generally experienced a larger effect from climate changes, we may expect to find a larger human influence on Helene’s rainfall in some areas.”

NBC News noted that neither report has been peer-reviewed or published in any journals, “which is normal for rapid-attribution work.”

“In a warmer climate, it’s simple physics that for every 1 degree Fahrenheit of warming, the atmosphere can hold up to about 4% more moisture,” Shel Winkley, a meteorologist at Climate Central, explained. “Helene traveled over anomalously warm sea surface temperatures that were made at least between 200-500 times more likely along that track due to climate change, and those hotter sea surface temperatures allow tropical systems to carry more of this rainmaking moisture out of the Gulf, in this case with Helene.”

“When we’re looking at these events in the future, most of your idea around a tropical system is sea surge and its impacts along the immediate coast, but we now have to be prepared in a warmer climate for all of the different aspects of these extreme weather events to come together,” said Winkley. “They may not come together in just one area. They have far-reaching potential.”

Frieda Powers
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