Tropical Storm Harold made landfall on the Texas coast this week, becoming the eighth named storm in the Atlantic in 2023. As hurricane season arrives, Texas Wants to Know set out to learn if this summer's record-setting high temperatures could impact tropical storms.
Texas A&M meteorology professor Robert Korty says the heat could prolong the hurricane season.
"This heat wave will eventually break," he said. "So as the atmosphere starts to cool off in September, the ocean is still going to be quite hot. And that's when I would start to worry that all of this heat we've built up has sort of built a reservoir for conditions to be favorable in another month or so."
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Just because the season could be longer than normal, it doesn't mean more storms will threaten the Texas coast. KRLD Chief Meteorologist Dan Brounoff says the right combination of factors needs to converge for that to happen.
"It's a timing situation with cold fronts, where the troughs are, where the peaks and valleys are in the upper levels that determines, do they hit the East Coast? Do they move out to sea? Or does the upper-level ridge pull the storms through the Caribbean and move it into the Gulf of Mexico, towards Texas, all the way to Florida," he said.
Adjusted for inflation, 15 of the 16 costliest hurricanes in U.S. history have occurred since 2004, according to the National Centers for Environmental Information. E&E News climate science reporter Chelsea Harvey says there are two primary factors that go into it.
"On the one hand, hurricanes across the board are getting more intense because of climate change. So just the potential damage that they're able to cause is getting worse because they're just getting bigger and more destructive," she said. "And then on the other hand, we do have populations growing along the coastline. And so that just puts the total number of people in harm's way. It increases that number. And so when you have these two factors kind of colliding, it just really accelerates the amount of damage that these storms can cause."
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