![]() ![]() Humans didn’t always settle in a manner so disconnected from the planet: Overlay storm tracks from the last two centuries on a map of the world, and you’ll notice how, throughout history, most major cities were built outside their reach. One example of how the compounding forces of climate change, like sea-level rise, and more intense storms are overwhelming coastlines, according to Kerry Emanuel of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology: If Superstorm Sandy had occurred in 1912 instead of 2012, it may not have flooded Lower Manhattan. Hurricanes over the United States have also slowed more than 15 percent since 1947, contributing to a 25 percent increase in local rainfall. Because a warmer atmosphere can hold more moisture, storms can now dump more than 60 inches of rain on a single region (Hurricane Harvey, 2017). Storm surges now ride on an elevated sea level, flooding coastlines with walls of water more than 25 feet high (Hurricane Katrina, 2005). According to a 2021 study by Yale University researchers, warmer waters will soon draw extreme storms north as well, threatening to inundate densely populated cities like Washington, D.C. Once-established storm tracks are simultaneously changing as hurricanes last longer and penetrate deeper over land. Globally, the number of major hurricanes, including a new breed of ultraintense Category 5 storms with winds of at least 190 m.p.h., could increase by 20 percent over the next 60 to 80 years. While the total number of tropical cyclones - including “typhoons” and “cyclones” - around the world has dropped over the last century, in the North Atlantic more Category 4 and 5 hurricanes made landfall in the United States from 2017 to 2021 than from 1963 to 2016. With a few weeks left in the 2021 hurricane season, SD 1045 appeared to be the last opportunity to get a Saildrone inside a major hurricane, where it would try to harvest data that could help scientists develop a more sophisticated understanding of why such storms’ intensity has spiked over the last half-century.Īs climate change has accelerated, warmer atmospheric and ocean temperatures have increased the likelihood of a hurricane developing into a Category 3 storm or higher by 8 percent per decade. That August, a sister ship, SD 1031, successfully entered Tropical Storm Henri, but only in its early stages. The boats were frequently caught in doldrums and set back by powerful ocean currents skirting the East Coast of the United States. Jenkins and a crew of pilots in Saildrone’s cavernous mission-control room, set in a 1930s Navy hangar on the shores of San Francisco Bay, had been using a satellite link for months to maneuver SD 1045 and four sister ships into North Atlantic hurricanes. “The big engineering challenge was to create enough sailing power to get in front of the storm, but not so much power that the storm destroys the boat.” “The goal was not just to get into the hurricane but to get to the strongest quarter,” Jenkins said as we watched a video of the storm, shot from SD 1045’s masthead camera. ![]() Throughout history, most sea captains have tried to steer their vessels out of extreme weather, but the whole purpose of SD 1045 was to steer into it. ![]()
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