Climate Change To Bring More Destructive Hurricanes To The Northeast

Flooding from Tropical Storm Irene overwhelming a 
Waitsfield, Vermont farm stand in 2011. If new research
is true, Irene was not a worst case scenario in our 
neck of the woods. 

 Hurricanes need very warm water to survive.  

New England isn't known for its toasty ocean waters. That's why our hurricanes are pretty few and far between, right? 

But the waters off the Northeast United States are getting warmer with climate change, and that's not good news if you lack enthusiasm about hurricanes.  

Of course it takes scientists to determine whether the warmer water will give us New Englanders more tropical trouble. The answer, according to new research, is probably. 

The research suggests that hurricanes that pack a major one-two punch of high storm surges and serious inland flooding will be on the increase. Especially in New England, apparently. 

The hurricanes that are the subject of the research - that combination of storm surges and heavy rains, produce what are regarded as compound floods.  These compound floods are the worst of the worst. In these cases, walls  of water surging in from the oceans combine with surges of water from areas just inland due to extreme rains.

Technically, Hurricane Irene's cataclysmic floods in Vermont and elsewhere in the Northeast wouldn't even quite qualify as such a storm.  Irene did cause extreme inland flooding in Vermont and parts of New York and Massachusetts, but the hurricane's storm surge along the coast was damaging, but not a full-bore catastrophe. 

Instead, think 2017's Hurricane Harvey in Texas.  When it first hit the Texas coast, a large share of its destructive power was its storm surge.  Then, as Harvey slowly wound down, it unleashed unprecedented rains on eastern Texas, including Houston, the nation's fourth largest city. 

We don't want more Harveys, but the research suggests just such a scenario is in our future. 

As NPR reports:

"Scientists at Princeton University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology wanted to know if such storms will happen more frequently in the future. They began by looking backward, to see how frequently hurricanes cause both extreme storm surge and extreme rain. They found that, in the past, such storms have been rare. Along both the Gulf Coast and the East Coast, it has been unlikely that a person would experience such a storm in the course of their lifetime."

However, within a century with climate change factored in, hurricanes that cause these big "compound floods" will be much more frequent, with most people experiencing them within their lifetime. 

The largest increase in risk is in the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic States.  In those areas, a storm that had a less than 0.1 percent chance of happening in any given year would have a 10% chance of occurring in a given year, the researchers found.  

That's actually a huge increase. And also a huge problem because coastal areas from Virginia north are so thickly populated.  A storm of that magnitude would necessitate enormous, potentially chaotic evacuations. And potentially hundreds of billions of dollars in damage in each of these mega storms. 

We're not immune from this here in Vermont. There's no coastline here, obviously, so no storm surges. As we learned in Tropical Storm Irene, though, a hurricane or tropical system wandering into New England can cause horrendous damage way inland, in places like Vermont. Worse, if the research is correct, Irene wasn't even the worst case scenario for the Green Mountain State. 

I also want to see more studies on more middling tropical storms and hurricanes. It stands to follow that destructive, but not cataclysmic tropical storms would also become more common in places like New England.

We've had what I would regard as at least circumstantial evidence that "regular" tropical storms are harassing the Northeast more than they once did.   Tropical Storms Elsa, Henri and Ida all affected Nw England in 2021, so that's three in one year.  Luckily, though the three storms caused damage, they weren't cataclysmic. At least in New England. 

Will New England suffer more hurricane seasons like 1954, when Hurricanes Carol, Edna and Hazel all caused damage in New England? Those compound flood storms in the research I talked about in this post are bad enough. Repeated, somewhat more modest sized hurricanes would cumulatively at least as much damage and trouble.