Climate change is messing with global wind speeds, impacting planetary health

Climate change is disturbing wind patterns across the globe in dramatic ways. And when combined with land-use change and desertification, these changes are spawning immense sand and dust storms that pose an ever-increasing risk to human health.

These mega wind storms now affect an estimated 330 million people annually, exposing communities to harmful particulate matter, and sometimes including toxic materials. That’s according to a warning released by the World Health Organization and World Meteorological Organization earlier this year.

“The frequency and severity of sand and dust storms is increasing, and it’s increasing globally,” says Aaron Cohen, principal scientist emeritus with the Health Effects Institute, who was part of an international team of scientists who recently advised that such storms present a “growing global health threat.”

“[S]and and dust pollution travels over very long distances. And it isn’t just carrying dust and sand; it picks up all kinds of other pollutants,” Cohen explains. These intensifying storms have been linked to respiratory and cardiovascular illnesses, while also being directly linked to meningitis outbreaks in the Sahel region of Africa.

According to a WMO and WHO analysis, around 3.8 billion people were exposed to dust levels exceeding the WHO’s safety threshold between 2018-2022; that’s a 31% increase from the 2.9 billion people exposed during 2003-2007.

Concerningly, these sand and dust storms are now occurring in, and affecting, areas not previously considered sources of dust, says Sara Basart, a WMO scientific officer who leads the Sand and Dust Storm Warning Advisory and Assessment System. “These [new] sources are usually close to where … people live,” she adds

As climate change escalates, these extreme events will likely increase and strengthen further, Basart notes, driven by short-lived convective storms that bring strong winds able to pick up huge amounts of sand and dust and carry it thousands of miles from the points of origin.

“If the occurrence of these extreme convective storms is higher, the possibility to have more sand and dust storms is higher [too],” says Basart, adding that this potential rises when combined with intensifying land-use change, vegetation loss and soil degradation.

Wind is “an environmental weather phenomenon. That means changes in the land and changes in the frequency of weather patterns can increase both their occurrence and intensity,” she explains.

Whipping up a storm

Sand and dust storms are, however, just one face of changing global winds, and offer just one example of how globally warmed wind patterns are impacting communities and public health across the planet.

Climate change is supercharging ever more powerful and dangerous storm systems, ranging from supercell thunderstorms and derechos to hurricanes — all of which can include dangerously high wind speeds and occur in increasingly unexpected places.

As the world’s climate gets hotter, warming ocean waters combine with warmer air that can hold much more moisture, to create stronger and more destructive precipitation events. Those conditions can also fuel intense winds.

Research shows, for example, that hurricane wind speeds in the North Atlantic increased by 8.3 meters per second (nearly 30 kilometers per hour, or 19 miles per hour) on average between 2019 and 2023 due to climate change. This resulted in 40 hurricanes moving up a hurricane category — leading to more violent winds packing a more powerful punch able to kill or harm more people.

Ralf Toumi, director of the Grantham Institute at Imperial College London, and his team are tracking how climate change intensifies the wind speeds of destructive storms.

He uses hurricanes Helene and Milton that struck the U.S. in 2024 to illustrate his point. Toumi and his team found that climate change increased Helene’s wind speeds by 13 mi/h (nearly 21km/h) and Milton’s by 11 mi/h (17.7 km/h) This shift moved up Milton from a Category 2 to a Category 3 storm, which ultimately caused upward of $30 billion in damage; Helene made landfall as a Category 4, costing $78.7 billion.

“The climate change component is adding that extra [wind] intensity,” Toumi says. “Our simulations are showing that in a warming world, these storms and extreme winds will just get stronger and more devastating.”

Severe damage is happening not only to human communities, but natural ones. In the tropics, for example, researchers believe intensifying convective storms may pose a threat to forests by combining higher winds with lightning.

Climate change and its drought inducement is likewise increasing the number of “fire weather days” — hot, dry weather that combines with strong winds to fuel flames. These are the kinds of conditions that produced the 160 km/h (100 mi/h) Santa Anna winds that drove the catastrophic Los Angeles wildfires of January 2025. Wind-whipped fires, with their intense toxic smoke result in both short- and long-term public health and property threats, including harm posed by post-fire “sick homes.”

Over the past 20 years extreme wildfires have doubled in number. This is contributing to massive destruction of forests, but also mega wildfires that sweep into urban areas and pose a high risk to human health, especially children.

Changes to winds high up

The winds of change we experience directly are surface winds, but wind patterns high above Earth’s surface are also being dramatically altered by global warming; those changes, too, impact our health in major ways.

Escalating extreme weather events have been linked to changes in the jet stream — bands of high-altitude, high-speed winds that circumnavigate the planet, moving generally from west to east. Recent research suggests that more violent wind gusts resulting in increased high-altitude turbulence can pose a risk to air travel in some parts of the world. As climate change progresses, this problem is set to increase, meaning bumpier — and potentially more dangerous — flights in the future.

But airline jitters aside, shifts in Earth’s jet stream have been linked to a laundry list of extreme events, from hot and dry summer heat waves in Europe that resulted in thousands of deaths in 2022, to reduced rainfall in California, raising the wildfire threat.

In the Northern Hemisphere, researchers believe climate change-induced slowing of the jet stream circling the Arctic is resulting in increased “waviness,” as weather-driving high-altitude winds dip far from the polar region to lower latitudes, with those waves then sometimes stalling in place.

This waviness, some researchers say, is linked to both extreme drought and deluge, as the stalled jet stream blocks both high- and low-pressure weather systems, holding extreme heat, drought, precipitation or even cold snaps in one place for days or weeks at a time. The vast heat domes sometimes produced by jet stream blocking can be especially unhealthful and deadly.

Put simply, a meandering, sometimes static jet stream makes extreme weather events more persistent, says Jennifer Francis, a senior scientist at the Woodwell Climate Research Center, increasing the damage and harm they can cause to people and ecosystems. However, a recent study challenges the hypothesis that global warming is causing big jet stream fluctuations, arguing that waviness existed prior to human impacts.

In winter months, a jet stream that dips from the Arctic as far south as the Gulf of Mexico produces the so-called polar vortex, with its more sustained more intense cold snaps, or slow-moving snow storms that disrupt communities and put vulnerable people at risk.

“The weakening of the wind can change the speed of a storm system and make it move slower,” explains Shuang-Ye Wu, a climate scientist at the University of Dayton in the U.S. “Even if it’s the same intensity, if it moves slower, it means it stalls in place, and it could generate more precipitation, leading to greater floods, for example.”

When the wind doesn’t blow

Climate change is complicated, and while it is clearly intensifying wind speeds during extreme storms, the overall global daily trend is contrary to that and likely one of “global stilling,” or reduced average surface wind speeds. Because wind is governed by temperature and pressure gradients, in general, the global wind system tends to weaken as climate warms, says Wu.

“What we’ve seen is that from the 1960s through to around 2010, wind speeds have been kind of generally slowing down,” notes Hannah Bloomfield at Newcastle University in the U.K. Since the ’60s, average terrestrial wind speeds have declined by 0.5 km/h (0.3 mi/h) each decade. From around 2010 onward, there are indications this trend reversed, with winds speeding up slightly. But there remains uncertainty around these calculations.

“Interestingly, since 2010 winds have actually sped up again,” says Bloomfield. “But when we look [slightly] forward using climate models, and [then] look far forward into the future, our average wind speeds globally are expected to decline.”

Researchers today are concerned that tomorrow’s future warming will bring periods of prolonged low winds, known as wind droughts. Lengthy periods of little, or no, wind can intensify heat domes and increase pollutant concentrations (including ground-level ozone), by eliminating the atmospheric mixing and circulation needed to disperse heat and contaminants.

It’s expected that this terrestrial stilling will also cause declines in wind power output in some regions, impacting energy grids. A power outage and shutdown of air conditioners in an intense heat wave could expose vulnerable people to dangerously high temperatures.

A recent paper suggests that around 20% of wind turbines “are in regions at high future risk of record-breaking wind drought extremes.” This study found that wind drought under a future warming climate could bring serious water drought to eastern North America, western Russia, northeastern China and north-central Africa.

Based on projections, Europe’s wind speeds could fall by around 5% on average by mid-century, and this could increase to 10% by 2100. “Europe is one of the regions where we see prolonged low wind speed times increasing, particularly in the North Sea, which is one of the places where we are building a lot of wind farms,” says Bloomfield.

Weak winds can combine over the oceans to exacerbate the effects of marine heat waves. A marine heat wave in the North Atlantic in 2023 broke temperature records, contributing to heat waves across the European continent. Earlier this year, researchers published a paper that found weak winds played a key role in this event.

“We can get periods of time where you have particularly low winds that can obviously affect the delivery of power if you’re relying on wind energy,” says Matthew England, lead author on that paper and a physical oceanographer at the University of New South Wales, Australia. “But weak winds under a global warming scenario are also particularly dangerous for heat waves.

“Under climate change, we’re getting these marine heat waves playing out because of ocean warming and extra heat trapped by greenhouse gases,” he explains. “But they get particularly bad and nasty if the winds are weak. The reason for this is that a weaker wind field means that the overturning effect — that churning of the surface warm [ocean] layer with the waters below — is reduced.”

England’s team didn’t find any evidence that winds in the North Atlantic have weakened over time thus far. Rather, “It’s as though 2023 just got particularly unlucky and had these periods of very weak winds play out,” he says. But a warming world with prolonged wind droughts could make marine heat waves worse, in turn impacting large land masses.

Rapid polar changes

Long term, some of the most impactful alterations in wind patterns may be happening in the Arctic and Antarctic — with far-reaching global implications.

In the Arctic, wind’s role is hastening sea ice loss, which in turn is helping heat up the planet.

“Generally, the relatively weak winds in the Arctic [didn’t] have much of an impact on the [polar] ocean” in the past, says Morven Muilwijk, a physical oceanographer with the Norwegian Polar Institute. That’s mainly due to the region’s sea ice acting as a shield against the effects of wind and waves.

“But what we’re seeing now is that, as the Arctic is warming up, we’re transitioning to much more of a seasonal sea ice cover with more open water.”

With the sea ice shield diminished, wind is helping break up fragmented ice. “Stronger winds mean more drag on the ice and the ocean,” says Muilwijk. This, in turn, increases mixing of the ocean’s layers.

This “enhanced ocean circulation beneath the ice” can mean more ice melt as warmer, saltier waters mix with colder and fresher surface layers. Research also suggests that winds are increasing in Antarctica, which could cause a similar impact on ice melt.

Arctic cyclones are changing too, with research suggesting they’ll intensify with climate change. It is already estimated that Arctic cyclones have intensified and become longer lasting over past decades.

That’s a concern, as these short-lived storms can result in rapid seasonal sea ice loss. Steven Cavallo, a professor at the University of Oklahoma in the U.S., says it’s possible these cyclones are accelerating a shift to an ice-free Arctic in summer.

But Cavallo cautions that “There’s still a lot of unknowns. It’s really hard to figure out definitively from our observations what’s going on with Arctic cyclones, because there’s so many changes happening in the Arctic.”

Major shifts in wind and sea ice have implications for Arctic communities, bringing intensifying storms that cause coastal erosion, infrastructure destruction, and loss of traditional livelihoods such as hunting and fishing conducted from atop floating ice.

But Muilwijk also notes that the wind’s effects on sea ice have far-distant consequences, with changing atmospheric currents altering freshwater distribution and ultimately influencing global weather.

“I think the key message here is that these changes … have implications that go far, far beyond the Arctic’s borders,” he says.

Experts Mongabay spoke to underline that these dramatic changes — extremes of wind blowing harder or not at all — necessitate a range of measures: mitigating the health impacts from sand and dust storms, and preparing for reduced energy output from wind turbines by diversifying renewables and storage capacity. Above all, these planet-wide changes underline the need to address climate change.

“There’s actually kind of an upside or a silver lining to some of these very bizarre weather events and extreme weather,” says Francis from the Woodwell climate center. “I think part of what we’re experiencing is a wake-up call and a recognition that the climate crisis is here now … affecting all of us now.”

Banner image: A giant dust storm approaches the metro area of Phoenix, Arizona, Aug. 25, 2025. Image by AP Photos/Ross D. Franklin.

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