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According to a new study, Hurricane Maria was the most rainy storm known to have been shot on Puerto Rico. Climate change is partly to blame.
The worst rain fell on the mountainous central part of Puerto Rico, from north-west to south-east. This part of the island is rainy in normal conditions. On an annual average, it receives more than 150 centimeters of rain.
When Maria arrived in 2017, almost a quarter of that annual rainfall was eliminated in one day.
In an article published Tuesday in the newspaper Letters of geophysical research, Scientists from the University of Alabama at Tuscaloosa and Sonoma State University in California analyzed rainfall on the 129 hurricanes that affected Puerto Rico since the beginning of the conservation of reliable data in 1956.
They discovered that Maria was a monster compared to the past storms that had ravaged the American territory. The average amount of rain Maria deposited on the island in one day – about 15 inches – was 30% more than the previous record set by a tropical storm in 1985, and 66% more than the average over average. from what was previously the most important. The most expensive storm in the history of the island, Hurricane Georges in 1998.
The rain was extremely destructive. It has caused many floods, destroyed critical dams and helped dry up most of the island's drinking water. A previous article, published in February by another group of scientists, revealed that extreme rainfall caused tens of thousands of landslides in the interior of the island, "sometimes isolating communities for days. and weeks ".
In total, current estimates suggest that the storm killed about 3,000 people.
The new study was also aimed at answering a question that scientists, a few years ago, were generally moving away from: what was the role of climate change in this storm?
As climate change models have become more sophisticated, the area of so-called attribution science has become more robust, allowing scientists to begin to study how the current global climate affects specific weather events. Last year, scientists directly connected the hottest waters ever recorded in the Gulf of Mexico to record rainfall recorded when Hurricane Harvey hit Texas.
This last article on Hurricane Maria establishes a similar link. The authors discovered that a storm of a magnitude similar to that of Maria was almost five times more likely to occur today, with warmer air and more intense air pollution. 39 seawater, that it would have had in the 1950s, while the effects of global warming were only very young.
These results corroborate the results published in another document last year, according to which climate change was driving some storms to project 5 to 10% more rain compared to what they would have been otherwise.
However, the authors warn, more research is needed to investigate the complex relationship between our current climate and storms such as Maria, especially if policymakers hope to use this research to predict the future impacts of storms.
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