Featured image: A man surveys the damage done to his house by Hurricane Helene, which left a path of destruction from Florida to Virginia. Credit: Chandan Khanna/AFP/Getty

Climate change sharply intensified almost 85% of hurricanes that hit the North Atlantic between 2019 and 2023, according to a modelling study¹. The wind speed of those hurricanes rose by an average of nearly 30 kilometres per hour — enough to have pushed 30 storms up a level on the Saffir-Simpson scale of hurricane intensity.

The study, published today in Environmental Research: Climate, traces the rise in hurricane intensity to the warming of the Atlantic Ocean, which is in turn driven by human-caused climate change. A companion report, based on the methodology in the new paper, suggests that climate change strengthened all 11 hurricanes in the North Atlantic— the Atlantic north of the equator — this year.