Here it is more than 24 hours later still pummeling those same islands

you see

Hurricane durian. It's stalled right there in its path

In fact at times it was crawling across the Bahamas at just one point six kilometers per hour

That's slower than the average person walks

So what causes hurricanes like durian to stall and why does it matter?

First of all, durian is not the first hurricane to stall not even close actually in

2018 for example hurricane Florence spent more than 50 hours within one small region of North Carolina and the year before

Harvey, lingered over the houston area for more than two days straight, but in every case

Hurricanes, that stall are really bad news

Because the longer they linger the more rain they unload and the more damage they deal

Harvey for example dropped more than sixty inches of rain in some parts of Texas and it cost the country an estimated

125 billion dollars

doreen on the other hand dropped more than 36 inches of rain in some regions and is expected to have a

multi-billion dollar price tag as well

So then why - hurricane stall in the first place think of a hurricane like a cork bobbing in a stream although it produces

Its own wind and spin it actually travels. Thanks to larger wind patterns

Which carry it along those wind patterns themselves evolve and change and sometimes

The winds that guide to hurricanes collapse endures what you might think of as a stagnation point. That's Tim Hall

I'm a senior scientist at NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York

And he says that at these stagnation points a hurricane has nowhere to go

So it just sits there

Dropping rain until another wind system picks it up and pushes it along and that's exactly what happened in the Bahamas

When Dorian arrived a pressure system nearby called the North Atlantic

subtropical ridge started to weaken and

That caused winds that were carrying the hurricane to essentially stopped blowing and it will definitely happen again

in fact those stagnation events

They're actually becoming more common and as a result, so are hurricanes that stall

according to Hall's research there were 66 hurricanes that stalled in the North Atlantic between 1944 and

2017 and nearly half occurred in the last third of that time frame

Which helps explain another trend the average speed of hurricanes in a given year is declining

in fact compared to the mid 20th century

Hurricanes today are moving on average about 17% slower

Scientists still aren't sure why but we've got some suspects and the suspects are that in a warming climate

climate model simulations show both in the future and in the past several decades

a

reduction in the overall

tropical wind patterns and

Unfortunately a stalled hurricane isn't the only consequence of climate change

It's also been shown to worsen storm surge increased rainfall and produce more intense storms

So while durian is of course devastating, it's likely just one of many hurricanes like it still to come

You