The Daily: A New Threat: Surprise Hurricanes

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From New York Times, I'm Michael Balorro. This is A Daily.

Today, Hurricane Otis, which killed more than two dozen people in southern Mexico this week,

has revealed a new kind of threat that meteorologists fear will become more and more common.

A severe hurricane that arrives with shockingly little warning or time to prepare.

My colleague, Judson Jones, explains.

It's Friday, October 27th.

Judson, we're coming to you because you are a meteorologist on the staff of The Times,

which is a pretty new development, I have to think, because I didn't actually know

that The Times had a meteorologist on our staff.

So I came on about a year ago, last Halloween, and it all came about because The Times wanted

to develop an extreme weather team. We often say extreme weather is the fingerprint of climate

change. So a lot of times, it's the evidence that the world is changing. And so by bringing

on a meteorologist and a data journalism team, my team is responsible for diving into the data

of these extremes. Got it. So the reality that climate change and extreme weather are deeply

interwoven is why you are at The Times. Absolutely. Well, let's turn to the reason

we're talking to you right now, which is an extreme weather event that happened just a

couple of days ago, Hurricane Otis, and why it felt so different to those of us watching

it than most hurricanes. What made Otis so remarkable and scary was that it rapidly

intensified from a tropical storm Tuesday morning to a Category 5 hurricane by nightfall.

Basically, it went from your run-of-the-mill storm to the most terrifying, powerful,

destructive kind of hurricane in less than 24 hours. Yeah. I mean, it was the ultimate nightmare

scenario. So tell us the full story of Otis from the beginning, from your perspective,

as somebody watching it. Well, in full transparency, on Wednesday morning, I woke up and went,

what happened? Like, normally, we have a lot of lead-up time to hurricanes, right? Like,

we're tracking them across the Atlantic Ocean or tracking them across the Pacific Ocean.

You can see them coming. It gives the forecast models time to initialize and give different

results over a couple of days. So there's this chance to kind of understand that the storm is

coming here. This storm. Otis is new to the scene in the Eastern Pacific. This is a tropical storm.

Formed on Sunday. It was 40 miles per hour. Otis is pushing its way towards Acapulco. So we're

going to see some very heavy rain around the southwest of Mexico. On Monday, it was 50 miles per

hour. The forecast models weren't really showing it intensifying at all. Tropical storm. Otis continues

to spin in the Eastern Pacific. Wednesday morning, it was still a tropical storm. So around 50 miles

per hour. But by midday, it was 80 miles per hour. It was a category one hurricane strength.

It started to look even more like a hurricane on satellite, which kind of gives an indication that

it's intensifying. An eye started to form. Now let's talk about this one in the Pacific.

This thing just jumped up just to a category three. And then that afternoon, hurricane hunters

flew through the eye twice and found that it was actually a category four strength hurricane.

Now we go to a potentially dangerous situation developing in Mexico. A rapidly intensifying

hurricane is making its way toward the resort community of Acapulco. And then later that night,

all of a sudden it was 165 miles per hour. The strongest storm that has ever hit the west coast

of Mexico. So every hour or every two hours, this thing is becoming like an entire order of magnitude

bigger. And that's just not you're saying normal. You know, it's one of the fastest strengthening

storms we've ever experienced. It is beyond the definition of rapid intensification. The typical

definition is 35 miles per hour in 24 hours. This one went above 100 miles per hour in 24 hours.

Like it jumped from a tropical storm to a category five. I mean, it's just unheard of.

It's remarkable in meteorology terms. Okay. So when this very anomalously

intensifying storm arrives on the western coast of Mexico as a category five storm,

describe for us what happens given the fact that from everything you're saying,

there hasn't been very much time at all to prepare.

The winds came in howling. I mean, they were ripping off palm leaves and you can see it in video

before all the power cut off. Then all of a sudden, you know, these these tourists and the

residents, they're nearly a million people live in the city had broken shattered windows.

The sides of buildings were starting to rip off. You know, you can see the rain coming

into people's bedrooms, you know, where they're trying to sleep. I mean, this came in

normally when people would be sleeping. Right. I think I remember 1 a.m. local time or so.

Yeah. I mean, you just imagine like you think you're just going to sleep through the storm

and then all of a sudden the windows are just being shattered.

And by the time the sun came up, you know, cell towers were down. Internet was down.

It was really difficult to find out what was going on on the ground. But we know now that the

damage was extensive. Twenty seven people have died and more are still missing,

which really would seem to highlight the problem of rapid intensification.

You don't have time to evacuate people and therefore more people die.

Yeah. In this modern age where you expect forecast and people to be able to evacuate,

we never want to see anyone die in the storms as meteorologists.

Like that's why we forecast it's to save lives. And so it just goes back to

the ferociousness of this storm. Just how unusual is Hurricane Otis,

given everything you've just described, which makes it feel very unusual?

Not as unusual as we hope. I'm afraid that we're going to see this happen more frequently.

You know, studies are showing that rapid intensification is happening more often.

I think that's the future we need to prepare for.

We'll be right back.

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You can do that at nytimes.com slash subscribe.

Justin, what is the evidence that storms like odys, that intensify in what feels like

lightning speed with so little warning, are now becoming more common,

and are not as unusual as you would like them to be?

It's one of the things that you can actually attribute to climate change a little bit.

There are studies that have shown that typhoons and cyclones, which are just

hurricanes in another ocean basin, that they're rapidly intensifying more frequently.

Even a study just a couple weeks ago that focused specifically on hurricanes in the

Atlantic showed that in a warming world, rapid intensification is twice as likely to happen.

So essentially, the thing that tells us that this is becoming more common

is people studying old storms and saying there's no denying this reality.

Yeah, I mean, even the storms I've covered over the last decade kind of used to feel like something

we would occasionally say, like this storm is going to rapidly intensify,

or that storm just rapidly intensified, and now it almost feels like every storm we cover,

it's just another indication.

Right. And I want you to just mechanically explain why this intensification is happening.

Clearly, the main driving factor is warming water temperatures, but I want you to just

remind us how that works and how a warmer body of water means that a small storm is

becoming a massive destructive storm so quickly.

Well, to have a hurricane, you need to have warm water.

It has to be 80 degrees Fahrenheit or higher to really give it the energy that it needs, right?

So think of a hurricane as like an engine and that energy, that warm water is the fuel that's

fueling the hurricane. Typically, you know, these storms that they sit over an ocean in an area for

a long period of time, they continue to pull that energy up into the hurricane,

but down below, colder water starts upwelling. So that hurricane is pulling colder water that's

replacing that warm water. But what we're seeing in this warming world is that it's not just the

ocean surface temperatures that are warming, the column of water is warming. So instead of pooling

colder water up into the hurricane, it's upwelling warmer water that is again above 80 degrees,

which gives more energy to the storm. So instead of a hurricane just kind of

petering out because it's lost that fuel, instead, it's pulling more energy into that storm.

That's fascinating. So when there's more and more fuel in the ocean for the hurricane,

the chances of it speeding up become higher and higher, the chances of it petering out becomes

smaller and smaller. Yeah, that's exactly right. So if you're a meteorologist, which you are,

how does this new reality of there being so much warm water fuel for these storms to intensify,

how does that change your role in warning people about these dangerous storms?

It's almost like we turned back the clock a little bit on forecasting. We've come a long

way in meteorology. If you think back to the Great Galveston Hurricane in 1900,

they didn't have warning. And then the satellite era came and all of a sudden we could see these

storms in the Atlantic and we knew that they were going to move towards the U.S. So we've

constantly been improving. Forecast models have even gotten better. We have this ability to see a

storm out in the Atlantic and say, hey, that may hit the U.S. in two weeks. However, when you

have this rapid intensification equation, like this problem that inserts itself,

it changes the game. It undermines all that technology and says to it, you're not up to the

task. Yeah. And I mean, I think scientists are quickly trying to develop better models

to predict this intensity because it is a scary thing. I mean, we want to warn people

and it helps to be able to see in the future. Well, what would help you adjust to this pretty

scary new reality about faster, intensifying storms? What would help you be able to predict

that Otis was going to do what it ultimately did? Are there some straightforward, easy solutions to

that? I think one thing is better observations. I think we're getting in an age where we're launching

weather satellites all over the place and that's helping improve our forecasts. Like having a

better understanding of just how intense the storm is ahead of time is key. But even in this

situation, it took a hurricane hunter flying through the storm to really know how intense it was.

So I think that's one thing, right? But the other thing is the forecast, like these super

computers that are trying to predict the future, we need to continue to develop that science.

For example, if we had more sensors in the Pacific Ocean, we could get better data

and understand what is actually coming from the West to the East or from the East to the West,

depending on what part of the Pacific Ocean you're in. If we get more data, the forecasts are going

to get better. Okay, but even if we get more sensors in the Pacific Ocean and even if we get

better forecasts and better warnings on these more quickly intensifying storms, that doesn't solve

the problem of helping people on land to prepare when by definition, they just have less and less

time given the warming water. So how are we supposed to solve for that? I mean, the straightforward

answer would seem to be, we need to cut back on emissions, which is clearly a root cause of these

warming temperatures, creating these nightmare scenarios. But even if we did that, that would

take time. So what do we do now? If you live in a coastal community and you're getting less and

less time to prepare for a hurricane, what can be done? A lot of it ends up coming down to mitigation.

It comes down to as simple as building materials, right? Like there are things called hurricane

ties that you can get for a few bucks to hold down your roof to the rest of the framework

of your house so the roof doesn't blow off. There are things that can be done to help mitigate

that disaster. Another thing is, you know, not building in floodplains. We're seeing a lot more

of that. But then it's also having shelters readily available that are hurricane proof or

tornado proof. Like there are things that cities and towns and countries can do to help mitigate

the disaster by giving people options if they're in the path of a major storm.

Right. Options that increasingly perhaps need to acknowledge that there might not be time

to get in your car and drive for hours and hours. But are contingency plans that perhaps recognize

that you may end up needing to stay in your community when one of these storms very rapidly

becomes something super dangerous? Absolutely. I'm curious, just thinking about the fact that you

are a meteorologist. If this situation we're describing makes you feel an immense amount of

pressure to get things righter than ever before. I mean, there's always lots of carping when a

meteorologist gets something wrong. You told us to worry about a storm. It passed us or annoyed

with you. But the burden now feels even more intense because if you're wrong, the amount of

time, the room for error is vanishingly small and the danger is so much greater and that puts you

in a very tricky position. Yeah. I mean, meteorologists have always gotten it wrong. That's why it's a

joke because it's a science meteorologist. What they're doing is creating a hypothesis.

So when they're forecasting, when a meteorologist like myself is giving you a forecast, they're

giving their best educated guess based off of everything that's happening around. So

as I write these stories and I'm trying to forecast these bigger storms, being right is not easy.

I feel responsible for what people may think by reading those words. Like, should they evacuate,

should they not evacuate? Is this storm actually going to be a big deal? And I carry a lot of that

weight on my shoulders. And in this world where storms can intensify and kind of come out of nowhere,

it's not the kind of storm I like to wake up to the next morning and go, oh, I should have covered

this two days ago so people had more warning. Right. I want to be able to warn people three or four

days in advance of a major hurricane. And when they rapidly intensify next to a city with nearly a

million people, that is the worst nightmare. Well, Justin, thank you very much. We really

appreciate it. Thanks for having me, Michael. We'll be right back.

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Here's what else you need tonight. A massive manhunt entered its second day in Maine,

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