Climate change significantly intensified Cyclone Chido as it approached the Indian Ocean archipelago of Mayotte, according to a preliminary study by scientists investigating the connection between global warming and tropical storms.
The assessment, conducted by Imperial College London, found that cyclones like Chido are now 40 percent more likely in the warmer climate of 2024 compared to pre-industrial times. When it made landfall on Saturday, Cyclone Chido became the most destructive storm to hit Mayotte in 90 years, leveling tin-roof shacks in France’s poorest overseas territory.
Classified as a category four storm—just one level below the most severe on the five-point scale—Cyclone Chido tore through the small archipelago, where roughly one-third of the population resides in makeshift housing, leaving behind widespread devastation.
The full extent of the disaster caused by Cyclone Chido is still unclear, but officials are concerned that the death toll could rise into the thousands as more information becomes available.
Scientists at Imperial College London have been investigating the role of global warming in intensifying storms like Chido. To address the lack of real-world data, they employed an advanced computer model capable of simulating millions of tropical cyclones. This model helps scientists estimate how much recent global warming may have contributed to the increased wind speeds and severity of storms like Chido.
Scientists concluded that wind speeds near where Cyclone Chido made landfall had increased by 3 miles per second compared to pre-industrial climate conditions, largely due to global warming. According to their study, climate change “uplifted the intensity of a tropical cyclone like Chido from a Category 3 to a Category 4.”
While France’s weather service has refrained from directly attributing the storm’s intensity to global warming, it acknowledged that warmer oceans—driven by human-caused climate change—have made storms more powerful. Meteo-France further stated that Chido’s devastating impact was primarily the result of its specific trajectory over Mayotte.
The planet’s climate is now nearly 1.3 degrees Celsius warmer than in the pre-industrial era, and this additional heat in both the atmosphere and oceans is fueling increasingly frequent and severe weather events. Warmer air can hold more water vapor, while elevated ocean temperatures cause more evaporation, both of which intensify the conditions that tropical storms rely on.
