© NOAA
Hurricane Michael is seen over the Florida Panhandle in mid-October 2018.
Hurricane Michael is seen over the Florida Panhandle in mid-October 2018.
The research, which was published Nov. 11 in the journal Nature, examined the rate that these storms "decay," or weaken, by analyzing historical intensity data for storms that made landfall over North America from 1967 to 2018. The paper's authors cited a rise in ocean temperatures amid a warming climate as the key factor behind the trend.
The study was conducted by researchers Lin Li and Pinaki Chakraborty, both of whom work at Japan's Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology. According to Nature, the study authors found "a significant long-term shift towards slower decay," which allows storms to maintain a higher intensity over land for a longer time period. This slower period of decay was said to align "with a long-term regional mean sea surface temperature over the Gulf of Mexico and the western Caribbean, which are adjacent to land and supply the moisture for the storms before landfall."
Comment: Weather is not produced from just moisture, temperature and air pressure. A possibility that has been studiously ignored is the Electric Universe model of weather. The Earth's atmosphere contains different electrical charges at different altitudes. The interaction of these layers, plus inputs from solar winds, have a great deal to do with weather.