In August, 1991, Hurricane Bob made landfall in Rhode Island, bringing Cape Cod hundred-mile-an-hour winds, knocking out power and destroying dozens of houses. More than three decades later, emergency officials, meteorologists, and climate experts wonder: when will the next big storm hit? And what kind of damage will it bring? CAI’s Eve Zuckoff raised these questions with Jennifer Francis, a senior scientist at the Woodwell Climate Research Center in Woods Hole in the first installment of The Big One, a special three-part series about preparing for hurricanes from CAI.
Eve Zuckoff: We haven't been hit by a major hurricane in 33 years. Why not?
Jennifer Francis: So, you know, this part of the country generally does not get hit all that often. So when hurricanes form out in the tropical Atlantic, they're carried by these westward flowing winds. And that generally takes the hurricanes into the Caribbean, towards Florida, towards the Bahamas, and sometimes into the Gulf of Mexico. The hurricanes only come up the coast when those winds, as they approach the east coast of the United States or the Bahamas area, curve towards the north, and that just doesn't always happen. The winds are much more variable the farther north you get. And so, it makes it less likely for a hurricane to come all the way up to New England.
Eve Zuckoff: Does the chance of a major hurricane happening now and making land on the Cape increase with each passing year?
Jennifer Francis: So the fact that we haven't had one in a long time does not mean it's more likely that we'll get one this year. But what does make it more likely that we could get one now, as opposed to, say, 20 or 30 years ago, is that the ocean temperatures are now much warmer. You have to have warm ocean temperatures to keep tropical storms alive, if you will, and in particular up in New England here for several years now, the ocean temperatures are running two, three, four, even five degrees Fahrenheit above normal, which is a lot for ocean temperatures to change. And so the chances of getting a major hurricane are now higher because of those warmer temperatures [which is a consequence of climate change]. And not only that, the warm temperatures exist farther north. And that means that the length of the hurricane season is now longer, and the chances of a hurricane coming up this way are more likely, especially in later months.
Eve Zuckoff: Is the Cape specifically any more at risk than other places in New England, as far as the likelihood of a major hurricane landing here?
Jennifer Francis: Yeah, actually the Cape is somewhat more likely to get hit by a hurricane because it sticks out into the into the Atlantic and the storm tracks, when they do come up this way, tend to parallel the coast. So you've got this Cape Cod sticking out like a thumb, and so it's more likely to get hit. Same story for Cape Hatteras down in North Carolina. And even as you get up into Maine and Nova Scotia, those areas also are somewhat more likely to get hit just because they they stick out to the east.
Eve Zuckoff: Do you have a worst case scenario storm in your head for the Cape?
Jennifer Francis: So there's sort of a worst case scenario storm track. And that would be any storm that hits just west of you. So let's say if you were in Falmouth, for example, a storm coming up the coast and hitting sort of New Bedford area. The east side or the bad side of the storm is worse because you've not only got the strength of the hurricane itself with its winds, whatever they are, but it adds to the forward motion speed of the storm. It adds those two speeds together. The other really important factor for this part of the world, on the south coast of New England, is that when a storm hits west of you, it means those winds are going to be blowing from the south and southwest, and that is going to push water up into places like buzzards Bay and Vineyard Sound. And that is what is responsible for the really bad storm surges that happened during the Super Hurricanes of 1938 and 1954 that caused so much damage here.
Eve Zuckoff: You know, we just saw Hurricane Beryl destroy communities from the Caribbean to Texas early this month. How has that affected your sense of how we should be looking at hurricanes?
Jennifer Francis: So we've known for several months now that this hurricane season in the Atlantic was going to be a very busy one. In fact, some of the predictions are the highest numbers of both hurricanes total and also strong hurricanes. And there's a couple of reasons for that that are quite clear. One is most areas of the Atlantic Ocean now are warmer than normal, and that is fuel for storms. The other factor is that we're transitioning now from a strong El Niño, which is this change in ocean temperatures in the equatorial eastern Pacific, which generally suppresses, hurricanes in the Atlantic. But now we're transitioning out of an El Niño and into a La Niña. And La Niña does make hurricanes more likely in the Atlantic Ocean because it. Induces what we call wind shear, and that is when you have winds blowing either at different strengths or from different directions, at different heights in the atmosphere. And when there's a lot of shear, it tends to rip apart a storm that exists, or it prevents a storm from forming in the first place because it can't get its sort of engine going. So we've known for months that this hurricane season was going to be a difficult one, and we're already seeing the likes of Beryl, which was the earliest forming Category four storm, and it was the only Category five in June ever seen.
Eve Zuckoff: Jennifer Francis, senior scientist at the Woodwell Climate Research Center in Woods Hole. Thank you.
Jennifer Francis: Any time. I'm happy to help with all this stuff because I really have a passion for helping people understand it and keeping people safe as best we can, so anytime.
This conversation has been edited for time and clarity.
Additional information about how to prepare for a hurricane, build an emergency kit, and set up emergency alerts can be found at www.ready.gov.
