The warming of the world’s oceans has intensified typhoons that make landfall, according to a study published Monday in the journal Nature Geoscience. “Over the past 37 years, typhoons that strike East and Southeast Asia have intensified by 12–15%, with the proportion of storms of categories 4 and 5 having doubled or even tripled,” the study says.
According to Wei Me and Shang-Ping Xie, researchers at the University of California, San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography, the problem is likely to worsen in coming years: “We find that the increased intensity of landfalling typhoons is due to strengthened intensification rates, which in turn are tied to locally enhanced ocean surface warming on the rim of East and Southeast Asia. The projected ocean surface warming pattern under increasing greenhouse gas forcing suggests that typhoons striking eastern mainland China, Taiwan, Korea and Japan will intensify further.”
