(MENAFN- AzerNews)
By Alimat Aliyeva
Climate change has seriously affected precipitation patterns
around the world. Scientists said that new weather conditions could
intensify typhoons and other tropical storms,
Azernews reports.
Taiwan, the Philippines, and then China faced the strongest
typhoon of the year this week, as wind speeds increased to 227
kilometers per hour, schools, businesses and financial exchanges
were closed. Hundreds of thousands of people have been evacuated
along China's east coast.
Scientists note that more intense tropical storms are part of
the growing phenomenon of extreme weather caused by higher
temperatures. Researchers led by Zhang Wenxia of the Chinese
Academy of Sciences studied historical meteorological data and
found that about 75 percent of the world's land area has changed
precipitation patterns or has large differences between wet and dry
weather.
Rising temperatures have increased the ability of the atmosphere
to retain moisture, leading to wider fluctuations in precipitation,
the researchers say in a paper published in the journal
Science.
Stephen Sherwood, a scientist at the University of New South
Wales Climate Change Research Center, said variability has
increased in most places, including Australia, which means longer
wet and dry periods. According to him, as global warming continues,
it will lead to an increase in droughts and floods.
Scientists believe that climate change is also changing the
behavior of tropical storms, including typhoons, making them
smaller but more powerful. Thus, the increased water vapor content
in the atmosphere causes more extreme hydrological phenomena.
Sachi Canada, a researcher at Japan's Nagoya University, says that
although it is difficult to link individual weather events to
climate change, models predict that global warming is intensifying
typhoons. He adds that the warming of the sea surface is a
favorable condition for the development of tropical cyclones.
In a climate change report released this month, China said the
number of typhoons in the Northwest Pacific and the South China Sea
has decreased significantly since the 1990s, but has become
stronger. Taiwan also said in a climate change report released in
June that climate change could reduce the total number of typhoons
in the region while making each one more severe.
Feng Xianbo, a tropical cyclone researcher at the University of
Reading, noted that the decrease in the number of typhoons is due
to uneven warming of the oceans; temperatures are rising faster in
the western Pacific than in the east. The capacity of water vapor
in the lower atmosphere is expected to increase by 7 percent for
every degree of temperature increase and by 40 percent for every
degree of precipitation increase as a result of tropical cyclones
in the United States.
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