CLIMATE-CHANGE MAKES 100-YEAR FLOODS EVERY 3-20 YEARS?

When Hurricane Irene spun through the Caribbean and parts of the eastern United States in August 2011 it generated storm-surges that swept over seawalls and flooded seaside and inland communities. Many hurricane analysts suggested that Irene was a '100-year event', a storm that only comes only once a century.
 
But researchers from MIT and Princeton University have found that with climate-change, such storms could make landfall far more frequently, causing powerful, devastating storm surges every 3 to 20 years.

The group simulated tens of thousands of storms under different climate conditions, and also found that today’s '500-year floods' could, with climate change, occur once every 25 to 240 years.

They published their results in the current issue of Nature Climate Change.

Reported on PhysOrg.