Typhoons are 50% more likely to be caused by climate change, finds Imperial research powered by DreamLab

Scientists at Imperial College London have found that the winds of Typhoon Gaemi in July 2024 were 50% more likely to have been caused by human-driven climate change, in research powered by Vodafone Foundation’s DreamLab project.

Typhoon Gaemi impacted the Philippines, Taiwan, and China, killing at least 75 people and causing hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of damage. It reached speeds of 227 km/hr – equivalent to a category four hurricane.

Using Imperial College London’s Storm Model (IRIS), the research also found that the maximum wind speeds of typhoons like Gaemi have become about 14 km/hr, or 7% more intense due to climate change. IRIS enables scientists to identify the relationship between climate change and extreme storm winds using millions of ‘synthetic’ storm tracks. The model enables researchers to rapidly investigate changes to the most damaging tropical cyclones, also called hurricanes or typhoons, and share them with at-risk communities.

Most climate models struggle to simulate the processes that cause devastating winds. As a result, very few attribution studies have been published on the effect of climate change on tropical cyclone winds. A previous IRIS analysis found that climate change nearly doubled the likelihood of Hurricane Beryl’s extreme winds when it reached Jamaica earlier in July 2024.

IRIS is powered by DreamLab, a specialist crowdsourcing app developed by Vodafone Foundation. DreamLab accelerates scientific research by using the processing power of dormant smartphones while users charge them at night. With 3.5 million downloads worldwide, the network of smartphones created by DreamLab is equivalent to a virtual supercomputer capable of processing billions of calculations without collecting or disclosing any users’ data.

Before human-driven climate change, similar events were expected to occur on average about once every 4 years. However, due to warming caused primarily by the burning of oil, gas and coal, Taiwan can now expect to be impacted by strong typhoons more frequently, the research suggests

IRIS is helping find breakthroughs for research on climate change and tropical cyclones. Through DreamLab, more than 163,000 individuals contributed to IRIS carrying out over 82 million calculations for the research.