Citation

Emanuel K. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U. S. A. 2017; 114(48): 12681-12684.

Affiliation

Lorenz Center, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA 02139 emanuel@mit.edu.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2017, National Academy of Sciences)

DOI

10.1073/pnas.1716222114

PMID

29133388

Abstract

We estimate, for current and future climates, the annual probability of areally averaged hurricane rain of Hurricane Harvey's magnitude by downscaling large numbers of tropical cyclones from three climate reanalyses and six climate models. For the state of Texas, we estimate that the annual probability of 500 mm of area-integrated rainfall was about 1% in the period 1981-2000 and will increase to 18% over the period 2081-2100 under Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) AR5 representative concentration pathway 8.5. If the frequency of such event is increasingly linearly between these two periods, then in 2017 the annual probability would be 6%, a sixfold increase since the late 20th century.

Copyright © 2017 the Author(s). Published by PNAS.

Language: en

Keywords

climate change; floods; hurricanes