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. 2022 Apr 12;13(1):1905.
doi: 10.1038/s41467-022-29379-1.

Attribution of 2020 hurricane season extreme rainfall to human-induced climate change

Kevin A Reed  1 , Michael F Wehner  2 , Colin M Zarzycki  3
Affiliations

Attribution of 2020 hurricane season extreme rainfall to human-induced climate change

Kevin A Reed et al. Nat Commun. .

Erratum in

Abstract

The 2020 North Atlantic hurricane season was one of the most active on record, causing heavy rains, strong storm surges, and high winds. Human activities continue to increase the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, resulting in an increase of more than 1 °C in the global average surface temperature in 2020 compared to 1850. This increase in temperature led to increases in sea surface temperature in the North Atlantic basin of 0.4-0.9 °C during the 2020 hurricane season. Here we show that human-induced climate change increased the extreme 3-hourly storm rainfall rates and extreme 3-day accumulated rainfall amounts during the full 2020 hurricane season for observed storms that are at least tropical storm strength (>18 m/s) by 10 and 5%, respectively. When focusing on hurricane strength storms (>33 m/s), extreme 3-hourly rainfall rates and extreme 3-day accumulated rainfall amounts increase by 11 and 8%, respectively.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare no competing interests.

Figures

Fig. 1
Fig. 1. Global surface temperature change.
a Evolution of the annual global and North Atlantic (defined to be 0–45°N) average surface temperature anomaly compared to 1850 using the CESM Large Ensemble from 1920 to 2020. b Global sea surface temperature anomaly for the 2020 North Atlantic hurricane season (June 1–November 30) relative to 1850 preindustrial period as calculated from the CESM Large Ensemble.
Fig. 2
Fig. 2. 2020 hurricane tracks and surface temperature.
Observed sea surface temperatures(color contours) and hurricane tracks for the 2020 North Atlantic hurricane season (June 1–November 30).
Fig. 3
Fig. 3. Actual and counterfactual storm tracks and rainfall.
a, b Simulated storm tracks that match observed named storms and c, d ensemble average accumulated rainfall in inches (in) for the 2020 North Atlantic hurricane season (June 1–November 30) for the (b, d) actual and (a, c) counterfactual ensembles.
Fig. 4
Fig. 4. Changes in storm rainfall.
Probability distributions of the a, b 3-hourly rainfall rate and c, d 3-day rainfall accumulated amounts in inches (in) associated with actual and counterfactual ensemble simulated storms during the 2020 hurricane season for observed storms of at least tropical storm strength. Results are shown for (left) for all rainfall output for all ensembles and (right) the 99th percentile amounts for each individual ensemble and initialization time. The sample size for b, d is 500.
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