"Landfalling Typhoons Have Become More Intense"

"In the Northwest Pacific, already a hotspot for tropical cyclones, the storms that strike East and Southeast Asia have been intensifying more than those that stay out at sea over the last four decades, a new study finds.

The proportion of landfalling storms that reach Category 4 or 5 strength — the storms that wreak the most damage, as recent examples like 2013’s devastating Super Typhoon Haiyan show — has doubled and even tripled in some areas of the basin, researchers found. The increases seem to be the result of faster intensification linked to warmer ocean waters in coastal areas.

The findings, detailed Monday in the journal Nature Geoscience, are in line with the broader increase in the most intense tropical cyclones expected with rising global temperatures, though these trends have not yet specifically been linked to human-caused climate change."

Andrea Thompson reports for Climate Central September 5, 2016.