Why Hurricane Dorian was so destructive: it was slow, intense and unrelenting
- Dorian was the strongest hurricane on record to make landfall in the Bahamas by pressure
- The storm stalked the Bahamas for more than 40 hours
The science connecting climate change to hurricanes like Dorian is strong. Warmer oceans fuel more extreme storms; rising sea levels bolster storm surge and lead to worse floods.
Just this summer, after analysing more than 70 years of Atlantic hurricane data, Nasa scientist Tim Hall reported that storms have become much more likely to “stall” over land, prolonging the time when a community is subjected to devastating winds and drenching rain.
Seeing it “just spinning there, spinning there, spinning there, over the same spot,” Hall said, “you can’t help but be awestruck to the point of speechlessness.”
After pulverising the Bahamas for more than 40 hours, Dorian finally swerved north as a Category 2 storm before being upgraded again to a Category 3.
It is expected to skirt the coasts of Florida and Georgia before striking land again in the Carolinas, where it could deliver more life-threatening wind, storm surge and rain.
“Simply unbelievable,” tweeted Marshall Shepherd, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Georgia and former president of the American Meteorological Association.