The climate crisis is making hurricanes more dangerous

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(CNN) - Hurricanes are the largest and most violent storms on earth and use the hot, humid air that is above warm water near Ecuador as fuel.

For a hurricane to form, warm and humid air near the surface of the oceans moves upwards away from the water and leaves less air in the lower part, near the ocean.

The pressure, and the hot and humid air that changes in temperature begin to turn forming a large system composed of clouds that is enhanced heat from the ocean and water, forming what we know as hurricanes, which are becoming more dangerous with climate change .

• READ: Dorian's arrival coincides with the moment when the strongest hurricane that ever touched the Atlantic

Here we explain how:

Storm tides are becoming more destructive - The rise in sea level, a product of the expansion of the oceans, the loss of ice sheets and the melting of glaciers, makes a storm more threatening. In the case of Florida, water levels along the coast are almost one foot (30 centimeters) higher than a century ago, which causes the storm to rise much more automatically.

Storms also get wetter - As water and air get hotter, evaporation increases and the air is able to hold more water. With a temperature increase of only one degree Celsius, the amount of water vapor increases by 7%. And since the climate crisis has already seen the world become a hotter degree than 100 years ago, that means there is more than 7% more water available in the atmosphere.

When the storms arrive, they emit that atmospheric moisture as rain, resulting in an increase in the rate of rain in hurricanes and all other storms. We saw this during Hurricane Florence (2018) and Harvey (2019), two of the wettest hurricanes ever recorded.

• READ: What are the spaghetti models that are reviewed in hurricane season and how to read them?

Storms become increasingly intense - The oceans not only get hotter on the surface but at lower depths due to human-caused climate change.

When there is a lot of heat content in the ocean, it allows storms to intensify rapidly through a process called rapid intensification, which is defined when maximum wind speeds increase more than 56 km / h over a 24-hour period. In the case of Dorian, which is the most recent hurricane that threatens the Caribbean and the coasts of the United States, at 11 p.m. ET on Wednesday, the storm had sustained winds of 85 mph (136 kph): the night before they registered at 80 mph (about 128 kilometers per hour).