Respond to prefers-color-scheme dark in app web views

Follow section front redirects in Spectrum

Enable NLP source in PCS for load testing

Switch off the News Alerts Survey Widget when we have enough responses

Poll to determine if new LUF updates are available

Allows the winning A/B test variant to be turned on without Spectrum deployment

Show infinite scrolling sections in Assembler MultiView

Show option for NLP article summaries in Action Bar

A general feature flag for Recipe Features that aren't yet released

Feature flag for media team features that aren't yet released

Use new Orca video player for preroll plugin in Spectrum

Show the snow tracker (instead of the heat tracker) on Spectrum

What’s the best bus to New York? We tested 5 for comfort and value.

You asked: Do I need a passport for my cruise?

Adaptive equipment is making national parks more inclusive

Biden honors distinguished Americans; Trump back in N.Y. court

Hope Hicks witnessed nearly every Trump scandal. Now she must testify.

State laws measure if a woman is close enough to death for an abortion

On Press Freedom Day, little to celebrate for Hong Kong’s journalists

Young Georgians want to be part of Europe. Their government is in the way.

Taxes are inevitable. Paying to prepare them doesn’t have to be.

The Capitals, a team in transition, know what they want this offseason

Is Pastis as good as our food critic thought? He sent spies to find out.

Nationals can’t solve Nate Eovaldi, drop series finale to Rangers

Teen grabs wheel when driver passes out and school bus veers into traffic

Cat climbed into Amazon return box, found alive 630 miles away

Brave Little Hunter is free: Baby orca escapes lagoon for open seas

Ask Amy: Should I be the best man if I think the bride is abusive?

Carolyn Hax: Husband keeps pushing modest spouse to wear sexier clothes

Miss Manners: Host eats luxurious breakfast, leaves cereal for guest

Israel’s offensive is destroying Gaza’s ability to grow its own food

Riot police and over 2,000 arrests: A look at 2 weeks of campus protests

‘It’s been abused’ Rep. McCaul on motion to vacate threat

Trump Media auditor charged by SEC with ‘massive fraud’

Google’s empire is massive. A judge will soon rule if it’s a monopoly.

Journalism in India is under assault

The dangerous new call for regime change in Beijing

Ukrainian men abroad voice anger over pressure to return home to fight 

An I bond is now at 4.28 percent. Are they still a good deal?

Use these 6 points to say no to a college you and your kid can’t afford

How this new rule protects retirement savers from costly advice

The New York Times, alone in its outrage over access to Biden

Wait, what is Stephen A. Smith talking about? Find out with our quiz.

Stephen A. Smith would like even more of your attention

Oswaldo Rivas

It all started with Hurricane Hanna, which swirled in from the Gulf of Mexico to Padre Island, Tex., on July 25. Originally forecast to move into South Texas as a tropical storm, with the biggest threat being heavy rainfall, the storm instead intensified quickly, becoming a strong Category 1 hurricane just before landfall.

Forecasters didn’t know it at the time, but Hanna offered a preview of what was to come during <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2020/11/10/record-hurricane-season-atlantic/" target=_blank>the record-setting</a> and destructive 2020 Atlantic hurricane season, as storm after storm underwent a process known to meteorologists as “rapid intensification,” in which storms gain strength extremely fast. This is an especially dangerous process when it occurs close to land, coming too suddenly for coastal residents to escape an exponentially potent storm.

Hurricane Laura’s rapid intensification is a sign of a warming climate, scientists say

The technical definition of rapid intensification is when a storm’s maximum sustained winds increase by at least 35 mph in 24 hours. This season, storm after storm outperformed this baseline. This includes Hurricane Iota, which intensified at the astonishing rate of 80 mph in 24 hours, <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/the_americas/hurricane-iota-nicaragua/2020/11/16/07d67732-283b-11eb-92b7-6ef17b3fe3b4_story.html" target=_blank>before slamming into the coast of northeastern Nicaragua</a> late Monday night.

Rapid intensification typically occurs in high-end hurricanes that reach Category 3 or above. Scientists now say this is happening more frequently, as storms are given a turbo boost from rising ocean temperatures. During the 2020 hurricane season, the waters of the Atlantic were unusually mild, the result of human-caused global warming superimposed atop natural climate cycles.

The increase in rapidly intensifying storms is “not surprising,” said Suzana Camargo, a hurricane researcher at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University, because human-caused climate change is expected to increase the occurrence of these particularly dangerous storms, most prone to explosive development.

According to Kerry Emanuel, a hurricane scientist at MIT, the 2020 Atlantic season provides a warning: The increasing tendency for hurricanes to rapidly intensify is a better gauge for how climate change is influencing them rather than how strong they ultimately get.

After Hanna slammed Padre Island, a staggering nine other 2020 storms would go on to exhibit similar or greater bursts of strengthening, often close to landfall and in places where it hadn’t happened before.

The 2020 season will go down in history for the dominance of the fast-blooming storms that prowled the Atlantic, raising the question of whether this is the new normal.

Two of the storms that intensified at the fastest rates occurred in the past two weeks, which is unusually late in the hurricane season. Hurricanes Eta and Iota each intensified by 80 mph in 24 hours, a rate that had been achieved just eight times before this year, and never after October, said research meteorologist Sam Lillo of the University of Colorado at Boulder.

Based on <a href="https://journals.ametsoc.org/jcli/article/31/20/8281/92614/Projected-Response-of-Tropical-Cyclone-Intensity" target=_blank>recent peer-reviewed studies</a> <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-08471-z.epdf?author_access_token=_9OqacbRYOHwslEUu3098tRgN0jAjWel9jnR3ZoTv0M9qdk4C5vdts5LWxw9W-qg0U_ub3N4DZI4Xtz-bIk9W9KfkC6fOfEiNNoy1twMvawPWEaScUWcLz_m8se4lob-OadIiDSYz68K3d5FuPgxOg%3D%3D" target=_blank>he co-wrote</a>, meteorologist Jim Kossin of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), said it’s clear that the odds of a storm rapidly intensifying have increased compared with what they were just a few decades ago.

Hurricanes are strengthening faster in the Atlantic, and climate change is a big reason why, scientists say

“In the early 1980s, the chance of having a hurricane intensification event of 35 mph or more in a 24-hour period was about 1 in 100,” he said in an email. “Thirty years later, the chance has gone up by a factor of five to about 1 in 20. I suspect that the chances would go up even further if we included the past few years in the analysis.” 

Kossin concluded: “The warmer than normal waters have certainly contributed to the rapid and explosive intensification events this year, and it’s very likely that part of that warming is due to human activities.” 

Plummeting air pressure and stronger winds mean a higher potential for disaster

Sam Lillo

It’s one thing to read about these trends and another to see them play out in the real world over and over again.

There were several storms this season that went through nearly continuous periods of rapid intensification lasting longer than a day, Lillo said. For example, Hurricane Delta, which struck Louisiana in early October, and Hurricane Eta, the first of two unprecedented back-to-back Category 4 landfalls in Nicaragua, both had winds increase by 105 mph in 36 hours.

Two Category 4 hurricanes hit the same place in two weeks. That’s unheard of.

Before 2020, Lillo found only four other storms since 1851 that achieved such a feat of rapid strengthening, including storms that are notorious to hurricane history buffs and those living along the Gulf Coast and in Florida: The Labor Day Hurricane of 1935, Andrew in 1992, Wilma in 2005 and Felix in 2007.

This year also had three storms that intensified by 100 mph in 36 hours, something Lillo says previously happened with only eight storms.

There’s another definition that captures how quickly a storm is growing more fierce, this one concerning the minimum air pressure reading in the storm. In general, the lower the pressure, the stronger the storm. Rapid deepening is defined as precipitous falls in atmospheric pressure of 42 millibars in 24 hours, and this has occurred with only 23 Atlantic storms since 1979, when reliable air pressure records began.

David J. Phillip

Yet 2020 had the most storms of any year to meet or beat the threshold, including Hurricanes Laura, Delta, Eta and Iota, Lillo said.

Before 2020, only three other Atlantic storms had an observed air pressure drop by 59 millibars or more in 24 hours: Gilbert in 1988 and Rita and Wilma in 2005. “Then Eta dropped 59mb and Iota dropped 65mb; two weeks apart, a few miles apart, and both [were] the latest in the year to do so,” Lillo said.

Epsilon shatters records as it rapidly intensifies into major hurricane near Bermuda

Gabe Vecchi, a climate scientist at Princeton University, said that while these statistics may come across as “kind of abstract,” they convey a troubling message. “These are the types of events … that are hard to predict on a weather time scale and leave people with little time to react … which can be extremely dangerous,” he wrote in an email.

Society of Environmental Journalists "Award for Outstanding Explanatory Reporting," 2018

Tufts University, BA in political science; Columbia University, MA in Climate and Society; Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, MA 

Andrew Freedman edits and reports on extreme weather and climate science for the Capital Weather Gang. He has covered science, with a specialization in climate research and policy, for Axios, Mashable, Climate Central, E&E Daily and other publications. 

Average Year-To-Date	1
Yearly Average	40
Record Most	67 (1980,2010)
Record Fewest	7 (1886,1905)
Last Year	38