With hurricane season underway, scientists are racing to understand the changing dynamic of increasingly intense storms on a warming planet.
" We know that conditions are changing. We know that our storms are intensifying," said Landolf Rhode-Barbarigos, an engineering professor at the University of Miami who specializes in designing more resilient structures. "This will bring a different type of demand to our structures."
To better understand that, Rhode-Barbarigos has been subjecting dollhouse-sized structures — a tiny red stilt house and a plexiglass model meant to replicate one of South Florida's plentiful concrete block houses — to the furious winds and waves generated in the hurricane wave tank at UM's Rosenstiel School on Virginia Key.
At about 175-feet long and capable of holding 38,000 gallons of seawater, the Sustain tank can whip up Cat 5 storm conditions. And so far, cranking up the wind and water is producing some unexpected findings.
"When we combine those two forces, so the wind forces and the forces that come from the water, the combined action is not always the same as one plus one equals two," he said. "It's complex geographically and spatially and in timescale with the storms."
Take Hurricane Katrina in 2005. The fierce hurricane reached Cat 5 status in the Gulf of Mexico, then weakened to a Cat 3 before landfall. But when it roared ashore just over 50 miles south of New Orleans, it still delivered a Cat 5-size storm surge, said Andy Hazelton, a researcher at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's UM-based marine and atmospheric cooperative institute. Same with Hurricane Ike. The 2008 hurricane reached Cat 4 intensity in the Gulf. It hit Galveston,Texas as Cat 2, but still pushed ashore a storm surge over 12 feet deep at the Louisiana border.
"All that water is gonna pile up ahead of [a storm]. So even if it weakens from a five to a four or three, it still has all that water and it can still push all of that ashore," Hazelton said.
That scenario is expected to become more common as climate change warms the planet. Scientists don't think storms will become more frequent, but they do predict more intense hurricanes that strengthen more quickly, under a process called rapid intensification. Why is still not fully understood.
"It's a forecast challenge," Hazelton said.
So while Rhode-Barbarigos studies what that will mean for structures to improve building codes, Hazelton is looking more closely at interactions in the hurricane tank to solve the forecast challenge. Understanding the energy exchange between warmer water and the atmosphere with sensors throughout the tank can also help shed light on the hazards produced by monster storms.
"Heat exchange, that's really what drives the storm, makes it stronger," he said. "Intensity forecasts have gotten better, especially over the last decade as we've had more computer power, better models, better understanding. But there's still cases, like Milton, like Melissa, where that rapid intensification happens really fast, and we don't fully understand that."
In 2025, Milton's winds accelerated by more than 90 miles per hour in 24 hours, jumping from a Cat 1 to a Cat 5 and causing more than $34 billion in damage, mostly in Florida. Fifteen people were killed and another 27 died from illness or injury related to the storm. Last year Melissa slammed Jamaica, with winds jumping more than 90 miles per hour in just 12 hours. At least 93 people were killed by the storm, with damage in Jamaica alone estimated at over $12 billion.
When it comes to protecting communities, Rhode-Barbarigos said engineers are racing to make recommendations to improve building codes when it comes to storm surge.
" It's the combined action of wind and waves," he said. "In our codes right now, these two are captured by two different models."
While codes regarding wind vastly improved after Hurricane Andrew, the complicated forces of water have room for improvement. Repeated waves as small as three feet can knock down a small house, he said. To make structures more resilient, he said the forces exerted by wind and water have to be examined together.
"When we think about storm surge, we typically think about water level. And it's not just the water level," he said. "It's the power that comes with that water level hitting a structure."
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