A cyclone that makes landfall with the wind speed of Cyclone Mocha is now about 50% more likely to happen because of climate change, compared to 40 years ago, according to a new rapid analysis.
The analysis was led by Prof Ralf Toumi, Co-Director, Grantham Institute - Climate Change and Environment, Imperial College London, said a press release issued on Tuesday.
Prof Toumi said: “Imperial College runs a global tropical cyclone model called IRIS. The model is built on observations to describe the life cycle of tropical cyclones and generates a million synthetic cyclones to build a new data set of global tropical cyclone climatology. The model is adjusted for the upward trend in the maximum potential intensity due to global warming since 1980.”
"From this, we estimate that tropical cyclone Mocha had a landfall sustained max wind speed which would happen on average about once in 30 years,” said the climate scientist.
“From the IRIS model, we estimate that this type of event is now about 50% more likely now compared to 40 years ago. Anybody can support the research by running the IRIS model on the DreamLab app on their phones."