Changes in Sea Surface Temperature and Cyclone Intensity over the Past Two Centuries

Marshall, J.

Author correspondence: info@stem4humanrights.com

Cite this article: Marshall, J. (2024). Changes in Sea Surface Temperature and Cyclone Intensity over the Past Two Centuries. Diverse Perspectives on Wellness, 3(1), 1-10.

 

Abstract

Our research shows that between 1857 and 2024, the number of hurricanes that qualified as major events more than quadrupled (p > .05), the amount of time per year spent experiencing a named storm increased from 24.6 days to 47.1 days (p > .05), and accumulated cyclone energy nearly doubled (p > .05), supporting reports of a strong correlation between rising sea temperatures and increased cyclone power.

Keywords: rising sea temperature, cyclone, hurricane, disaster response, resource management

Introduction

The progress of perception

Although the evolution of natural disaster risk perception had facilitated greater public participation in natural disaster prevention and mitigation efforts in the 2010’s, the feminist movement and a rising trend in unmarried adults fueled ongoing inquisitions about how global monetary policies reinforced the gender wealth gap and introduced a social climate where, despite their high perception of environmental vulnerability, saw individual, social and community-level concerns with economic stability that could outpace concerns with environmental protection. Monetary policy reform from policymakers, and the redistribution of community roles and resources led to a decline in social capital and within-group trust. The loss of momentum behind global efforts to roll back the rise of sea surface temperatures also coincided with the onset of a deadly infectious disease in the early 2020’s that took 4–5 years to become manageable without health agencies and global health workers becoming less preoccupied with its implications on a daily basis.

“Hopelessness among people with fewer choices became a chorus of voices screaming to tear it all down and start over. There so much opportunity in a period of uncertainty. The systemic structure that we all rely on starts to crack, and while the stable grimace, and those who were set to climb wonder if they may have to wait for a while, those who had no hope of advancement and had perhaps made peace with their current station, all of a sudden try to understand, and perhaps help enable a reformed future with a system that is either less restrictive or more supportive. And so those who viewed this reformist period as an opportunity for either less responsibility or more power envisioned an abrupt shift in their community’s culture that was prioritized above all else.”

-The Voice of the World As It Almost Falls Apart

Ocean warming & atmospheric instability

As the counterclockwise motion of the Earth and its axis supports the deflection of air in the northern hemisphere to the right and air in the southern hemisphere to the left, the path of a storm cannot be correctly calculated without accounting for the Coriolis force, an effect which when present in a mass of warm air, forms a low pressure center. The low pressure allows air to naturally flow into and deflect around the center. Heat is an indicator of the amount of kinetic energy a particle possesses, as well as its capacity to vibrate, translate and rotate. Given water’s high capacity to absorb and transfer heat, warmer water facilitates increased air particle vibration, heat transfer and wind rotation, and creates the perfect conditions for a cyclone. Between 1901 and 2023, sea surface temperature rose 0.14 F per decade (with the year 2023 being the warmest on record), as did the increase in power dissipation, rapid intensification occurrence and increased annual frequency of cyclones in the Atlantic and typhoons in the Pacific.

On neighboring land, warmer ocean temperatures have led to increased humidity in the atmosphere, generating a higher pressure warm air mass than usual. Typically, air from a cold front fills the space in between the warm air causing it to dissipate. However, in the case of higher pressure warm air masses, winds from the massive cold front have not been able to penetrate as much, thus, failing to serve their usual purpose of preventing a heat wave. Assuming the current rate of ocean warming is sustained, the frequency and duration of heat waves in the Amazon is projected to increase by an additional 214 days by 2090. How this will impact migration patterns in the four countries that host the Amazon rainforest is a story to pay attention to over the coming years.

Storm-prone populations & quality of life

Rising sea surface temperatures are also impacting the lifestyle of coastal residents, including beach attendance as winds deflect off the resultant high pressure heat mass over land and bring with it humidity that intensifies and recharges intense precipitation events. On April 27, 2024 in Rio Grande do Sol, Brazil, rivers overflowed, floods formed, and everything in their path was wiped out. The main lake in the metropolitan region reached unprecedented heights, and once the rain finally ended, 177 people were dead, 37 were missing, and 600,000 had been displaced. In addition to altering occupational differences in mortality and life expectancy, increases in hurricane intensity and frequency have reduced working days for fisherman, and maximum fish catch potential is estimated to decrease by as much as 50%.

With the cost and availability of seafood and the normally cooling air that coastal residents depend on for relief all impacted, homeowner’s insurance is also becoming one of the more difficult barriers to living in storm-prone areas. Higher insurance premiums have normalized not-for-profit insurance associations that once only existed as an emergency response to major disasters, and the rise in the number of coastal disasters per year have finally become frequent enough to noticeably disrupt housing stability and begin a migration of some coastal populations inland. While sustainable coastal cities with high-capacity stormwater management and control systems that account for excess stormwater runoff tend to fare better with the key components of threat appraisal like flood forecasting and rainfall-runoff modeling, some urban settlements near oceans and rivers with less capacity to accommodate the increased intensity and frequency of extreme precipitation events have been newly burdened by competition for resources, and planning policies preventing further expansion and signaling inland migration for those at high risk of displacement are the first indicators of an unpredictable trail of social upheaval.

Methods

Public discussions about whether tropical storms have become a greater threat to human settlements and housing stability have centered around hurricane frequency. However, given findings that show a strong correlation between the ocean’s temperature and the power dissipation index for tropical cyclones (R = 0.63), this study sought to assess different measures of impact in order to understand the underlying premise of reports indicating issues with tropical storm frequency and a reduced quality of life for some coastal residents. The North Atlantic Ocean Historical Tropical Cyclone statistics are comprised of annual numerical data from the ongoing HURDAT2 and NE/NC Pacific HURDAT2 studies collected between 1851–2024. Our study utilized the the Mann-Kendall statistical test for trends and time series to measure whether the change in a set of values over time were statistically significant. Microsoft Excel and R 4.2.0 were used to analyze these data and results were interpreted based on a significance level of p <.05.

Results

Table 1: North Atlantic Ocean Historical Tropical Cyclone (7-year average)

While there was no significant change in the 7-year average for hurricane frequency between 1857 and 2024, in that same time, the number of hurricanes that qualified as major events more than quadrupled (p > .05), and the amount of time per year spent experiencing a named storm increased from 24.6 days to 47.1 days (p > .05). Also, accumulated cyclone energy nearly doubled (p > .05), supporting earlier reports of the strong correlation between rising sea temperatures and increased cyclone power.

Discussion

As the heat from anywhere up to 150 feet below the sea surface contributes to the amount of energy a cyclone accumulates, which in turn increases its power dissipation, we can confirm that tropical storms, although occurring at the same annual frequency for the past two centuries, are becoming progressively more powerful. The sunlight pouring through the parts of the ozone filter where the chemical composition is increasingly contaminated by greenhouse gas emissions is having a worse effect on the ocean compared to land given water’s exponentially higher capacity to absorb and hold heat. Since there is reportedly no feasible path to replacing the ozone filter, cleaning it as well as concerted efforts to monitor what we allow to come in contact with the ozone have been two of the more celebrated human initiatives of the 21st century. While perceptions of disaster risk are now more aligned with actual risk, perceptions of urgency are also becoming increasingly aligned based on each population’s proximity to danger as more and more indicators like inverse crop yield, temperature variability, population killed by disasters, population affected by 1 meter sea level rise, population affected by drought, population affected by wildfire, population affected by glacial lake outburst flood, total damage costs, insured damage costs and reconstructed costs begin to flash red in one or more regions. Given that the annual cost of a continued rise in sea temperatures is at least 5% of the global GDP compared to mitigation measures that cost around 1%, the economic repercussions of a rapidly changing planet will certainly become a newsworthy item if efforts to roll back rising sea temperatures are less than successful.

Limitations

Gathering additional clarity regarding the correlations between rising sea temperature and an increasingly strained population-level experience of tropical storms and natural disasters is a critical planning step to inform emergency preparedness efforts at the local and state level. Rising sea levels have been linked to hydrological, geophysical, biological and climatological disasters, and mainstreaming threat appraisals (severity and probability of occurrence) and coping appraisals for each type of disaster among residents in the respective high-risk areas will help accelerate initiatives to right-size disaster risk perceptions. While our research doesn’t offer a deep dive into the thousands of ongoing planetary changes and human adaptive responses due to rising sea temperatures, preventative infrastructure upgrades based on predictive modeling that ensure upgrades to high-capacity stormwater management and control systems in order to account for projected levels of exposure to extreme weather will help mitigate water scarcity, dam failures, and toxic particles reaching key water sources while slowing competition for resources. It is also worth investigating a means through which to mitigate social and economic conflict in the event of increased competitive behavior, as well as projected trends in resource availability assuming a continued rise in sea surface temperature.

References

Ardaya, A.B., Evers, M. & Ribbe, L. (2017). What influences disaster risk perception? Intervention measures, flood and landslide risk perception of the population living in flood risk areas in Rio de Janeiro state, Brazil. International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction, 25, 227–237.

Brazil (2020). Fourth National Communication of Brazil to the UNFCCC. URL: https://unfccc.int/sites/default/files/resource/4a%20Comunicacao%20Nacional.pdf.

Debone, D., Tavella, R.A., Colombo, A.L., Gales, A.C., da Silva Junior, F.M.R., & Miraglia, S.G.E.K. (2024). Is It Time to Build an Ark? The Reality of climate change in one of the worst climate tragedies in Brazil.

Lange, W. Pirzer, C., Dunow, L. & Schelchen, A. (2016). Risk perception for participatory ecosystem-based adaptation to climate change in the Mata Atlantica of Rio de Janeiro State, Brazil. Ecosystem-based disaster risk reduction and adaptation in practice, 483–506.

Warmsler, C. Brink, E., & Rentala, O. (2012). Climate change, adaption, and formal education: the role of schooling for increasing societies’ adaptive capacities in El Salvador and Brazil. Ecology and Society, 17(2).

Despite wealth inequities, the Global North’s capacity for vaccine production and the Global South’s historical experience with handling emerging infectious diseases suggests a high complementary potential and an ability to put together an international collaboration agreement that rectifies “the gross inequities at national and international levels that hindered timely and equitable access to medical and other COVID-19 pandemic-related products” (Azzariti & Morich, 2023). However, one of the foremost barriers to achieving such a global agreement are perceived threats to sovereignty, which are often a primary source of conspiracy theories and may increase political opposition. That said, the competitive and opportunistic nature of global politics means the likelihood of a country diminishing its own authority during such a time of emergency and potential disorder is low to none. Thus, given that each country’s delegates and representatives are likely to insist on the greatest amount of border and information security at the expense of the member states’ collaborative potential, the final version of an effective global health emergency agreement is likely to include recommendations that insist on global coordination to the extent that they don’t interfere with national sovereignty. In this hypothetical instance, one might imagine countries agreeing to move in lockstep as it pertains to equitable access to financing and shared standards for disease surveillance and vaccine production, while acting independently according to their own traditions, cultural considerations and regional limitations as it pertains to others.

Although first-world funding for infectious disease surveillance in the Global South has been inconsistent over the last decade, countries in this region (e.g., Cameroon, Panama, etc.) have spent centuries battling malaria, yellow fever and other diseases that are notoriously difficult to contain due to their zoonotic nature. Thus, while the Global North outspent the Global South during the latest global health emergency, the Global South still miraculously accounted for a much lower proportion of the death toll while COVID-related excess deaths in the Global North skyrocketed beyond expectations (Schellekens & Sourrouille, 2024). In the context of health emergencies, currencies in the Global North are often more tangible (cash, vaccine production capacity) than those in the Global South (collectivism, emerging infectious disease expertise), and yet, given the Global South’s relative performance during the pandemic, the pandemic agreement’s effectiveness will perhaps be helped by the acknowledgement that, at least in the context of global health emergencies, the Global North is clearly in need of as much help from the Global South as it wishes to offer.

Operationalizing Equity

Given the acknowledgement that pandemic-era inequities suffered largely within the Global North and South were key proponents of the spread of COVID-19, and that the open-endedness of the previous agreement was a barrier to collaboration and compliance, the Zero Draft of the pandemic agreement explicitly discusses equity as one of its guiding principles and rights:

“Equity: The absence of unfair, avoidable or remediable differences, including in their capacities, among and within countries, including between groups of people, whether those groups are defined socially, economically, demographically, geographically or by other dimensions of inequality, is central to equity. Effective pandemic prevention, preparedness, response and recovery cannot be achieved without political will and commitments in addressing the structural challenges in inequitable access to fair, equitable and timely access to affordable, safe and efficacious pandemic-related products and services, essential health services, information and social support, as well as tackling the inequities in terms of technology, health workforce, infrastructure and financing, among other aspects.”

Table 1 below lists functional stipulations from different versions of the pandemic agreement negotiating text, along with viable operational definitions for added context:

Table 1: Operational Definitions for Equity based on the Terms of the Pandemic Agreement

Conclusion

One of the greatest benefits of competition between countries during the public health emergency is that competitiveness may have fueled technological and procedural innovation. The Global North’s development of new technology and the Global South’s advancement in infectious disease mitigation procedures supports the timing of such a collaborative agreement to help improve the world’s potential for a stronger coalition against future pandemics (Taylor, 2024). Despite concerns with national sovereignty, at the very least, exchanges of research methodologies and genetic information are imperative to effectively managing an emerging infectious disease with pandemic potential. That said, to ensure that concerns with sovereignty don’t interfere with guarantees of accountability to collaboration, and considering that both the Global North and South depend on collaboration to broaden access to vaccines, pathogenic data and high priority research, the most ethical route is perhaps to tie pandemic funding to global compliance standards by implementing a framework that requires contractual transparency, complementary exchanges of knowledge and technology, and reassurances of sovereignty during the centrally administrated mitigation of a global health emergency (Yu, 2024).

References

Azzariti, A. & Morich, D. (2023). Thematic Text Comparison: The Bureau’s text of the WHO CA+ for the consideration of the Intergovernmental Negotiating Body at its fifth (resumed session) and sixth meeting and the Negotiating Text of the WHO convention, agreement or other international instrument on pandemic prevention, preparedness and response (WHO Pandemic Agreement) for the consideration of the Intergovernmental Negotiating Body at its seventh meeting.

Marshall, J. (2023). Race-Based Disparities in Insurance Coverage Among Cancer Survivors. Diverse Perspectives on Wellness, 1(2), 1-10.

Ofongo, E.M., Raji, I. & Ofongo, T.M. (2024). Extrapolating Insights from the COVID-19 Pandemic for the Advancement of Global Health Policy and Practice: The Imperative of an International Pandemic Treaty. LAJOHIS, 6(1).

Proposal for negotiating text of the WHO Pandemic Agreement, 30 October 2023 for the consideration of the Intergovernmental Negotiating Body at its fourth meeting. World Health Organization, A/INB/7/3.

Schellekens, P. & Sourrouille, D.M. (2020). COVID-19 Mortality in Rich and Poor Countries: A Tale of Two Pandemics? World Bank Policy Research Working Paper, (9260).

Taylor, L. (2024). WHO pandemic treaty: “Torrent of fake news” has put negotiations at risk, says WHO chief. BMJ, 384(q243).

Wenham, C. & Eccleston-Turner, M. (2024). Will the pandemic treaty make it over the line? BMJ, 384(q395).

Yu, H. (2024). Proactively ensuring access to essential medical solutions: Lessons learned from the COVID-19 pandemic. In Intellectual Property Rights in Times of Crisis (pp. 83-103). Edward Elgar Publishing.

Zero draft of the WHO CA+, 1 February 2023 for the consideration of the Intergovernmental Negotiating Body at its fourth meeting. World Health Organization, A/INB/4/3.

Acknowledgements

This research was supported by Health Analytics & Visualizations.

Conflict of Interest

The authors declare no conflict of interest or financial incentive. The author’s relationships with the stakeholders and subject matter did not lead to unreasonable bias or compromise the objectivity of the research.

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