Ocean regions that fuel the planet’s most powerful hurricanes and typhoons are heating up in the North Atlantic and Western Pacific. These changes are being driven not just by warmer surface waters, but by heat that now extends far below the ocean surface. New research suggests that human-caused climate change may account for as much as 70% of the expansion of these storm-forming hot spots.
As these hot spots grow, they increase the likelihood that exceptionally intense tropical cyclones, sometimes described as Category ‘6’ storms, could make landfall near heavily populated coastlines.
“The hot spot regions have expanded,” said I-I Lin, a chair professor in the Department of Atmospheric Science at the National Taiwan University.
Lin shared the research during an oral presentation focused on tropical cyclones at AGU’s 2025 Annual Meeting in New Orleans, Louisiana.
Lin has studied the most extreme hurricanes and typhoons for more than ten years. Her work intensified after Typhoon Haiyan — also known as Super Typhoon Yolanda — struck the Philippines at peak strength in November 2013, killing thousands of people. In 2014, Lin and her colleagues published research in the AGU journal Geophysical Research Letters arguing that storms of this magnitude warrant a new classification, Category 6.
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