Human-caused climate change intensified deadly Hurricane Milton 's rainfall by 20 to 30 and strengthened its winds by about 10, scientists said in a new flash study . The analysis comes just two weeks after Hurricane Helene devastated the southeastern United States, a storm also fueled by climate change.
World Weather Attribution researchers said Friday that without climate change, a hurricane like Milton would make landfall as a weaker Category 2, not considered a "major" storm, instead of a Category 3.
WWA's rapid studies aren't peer-reviewed but use peer-reviewed methods. The WWA compares a weather event with what might have been expected in a world that hasn't warmed about 1.3 degree Celsius since pre-industrial times.
The team of scientists test the influence of climate change on storms by analyzing weather data and climate models, but in the case of Milton - which followed so shortly after Helene - the researchers used only weather observations data. WWA said despite using different approaches, the results are compatible with studies of other hurricanes in the area that show a similar hurricane intensity increase of between 10 and 50 due to climate change, and about a doubling in likelihood.
"We are therefore confident that such changes in heavy rainfall are attributable to human-caused climate change," said WWA, an international scientist collaborative that launched in 2015 and conducts rapid climate attribution studies.
