Global warming is likely to boost the power of the strongest tropical cyclones, a study released today says.
An additional one degree Celsius in sea temperatures in tropical regions where cyclones breed could lead to a nearly one-third rise in the number of the most powerful storms, it says.
"As the seas warm, the ocean has more energy to convert to tropical cyclone wind," say authors of the paper, released by London weekly Nature.
Previous research, based on observations over the past 30 years, has already suggested that hurricanes - as cyclones in the Atlantic are known - have become more intense as a result of warmer seas.
But the observational record for the Atlantic is more detailed and goes back farther than for storms in the Indian Ocean, known as cyclones, or those in the Pacific, which are called typhoons.
Seeking to fill in the blanks, a trio of US scientists crunched satellite data for the period of 1981-2006 in all of these storm basins.
They totted up the number of storms and the maximum wind speeds attained during each event, and compared this with sea-surface temperatures.
Over the 25 years under scrutiny, they saw no increase in the overall number of storms.
But there was a significant increase in wind speed among the most powerful storms, or those in roughly the top quarter for intensity.
