[TRENDING: What’s the ‘dirty side’ of a storm? | CDC gives guidance on Thanksgiving | Astronauts prepare for Saturday launch]The new study looked at 71 Atlantic hurricanes with landfalls since 1967.
It found that in the 1960s, hurricanes declined two-thirds in wind strength within 17 hours of landfall. But now it generally takes 33 hours for storms to weaken that same degree, according to a study in Wednesday’s journal Nature.“This is a huge increase,” study author Pinaki Chakraborty, a professor of fluid dynamics at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology in Japan. “There’s been a huge slowdown in the decay of hurricanes.”Hurricane Florence, which in 2018 caused $24 billion in damage, took nearly 50 hours to decay by nearly.