Mark Lennihan / AP

In this file photo, Louise McCarthy carts belongings from her flood-damaged home as she passes the charred ruins of other homes in the Breezy Point section of the Queens borough of New York, Nov. 14. A fire destroyed more than 100 homes in the oceanfront community during Superstorm Sandy.

Massive hurricanes that push piles of seawater city-blocks inland when they howl ashore will increase dramatically as the planet continues to warm, according to a new study.

"It is pretty clear" that climate change must affect hurricane activity "somehow," Aslak Grinsted, a climate scientist at the University of Copenhagen, told NBC News. "But it is not clear exactly how."

The study charts a novel path toward an answer. Grinsted and his colleagues combined different types of models used to study the question, validating and weighting their importance based on how well they explained past storm surges seen at six tide gauges along the Atlantic and Gulf coasts.

For every degree Celsius (1.8 degree Fahrenheit) of warming, the scientists find a twofold to sevenfold increase in the type of storm surge seen when Hurricane Katrina struck in 2005. 

In a paper published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the researchers write their finding "demonstrates a greatly increased Atlantic hurricane surge threat in a warmer world," which will be "further exacerbated by rising sea level."

Competing methods
Over the years, scientists have looked for answers through analysis of satellite observations, ship logs, and other historical documents, which are limited by quality, spatial coverage and time and give varying answers. 

Aslak Grinsted / Niels Bohr Institute

Extreme storm surges like that caused by Hurricane Katrina (2005) become more frequent in globally warming climate new research shows.

Others studies have used climate models focused on sea surface temperature in the main region of the Atlantic Ocean where hurricanes form. These suggest warming seas provide more fuel for hurricanes and produce a corresponding uptick in storm frequency or intensity or both, Grinsted said.

Different models, however, focus on the difference in temperature between the region where hurricanes form and tropical ocean temperatures. These models show little increase in hurricane activity since that temperature difference may not change much as the planet warms.

Grinsted and colleagues combined the two model approaches. "The end result is something that is very consistent with the regional sea surface temperature model," Grinsted said. 

The model also picks up a known decrease in hurricane activity during El Nino years, which is related to warmer-than-average sea surface temperatures in the eastern Pacific Ocean and increased wind shear.

Misleading result?
The paper is unlikely to settle the scientific debate over the relationship between hurricane activity and warming. 

Judith Curry, an atmospheric scientist at the Georgia Institute of Technology who is actively researching the relationship, told NBC News in an email that the new paper is "very misleading."

For one, she said their tide gauge dataset is inferior to the standard dataset of landfalling hurricanes maintained by the National Hurricane Center, which makes using the tide gauge to make statistical projections of future storm surges "unconvincing."

Greg Holland, a scientist with the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo., said he liked the tide gauge approach. 

"Creative and independent approaches like this provide new information for helping assess hurricane climatologies," he said in an email to NBC News, but added that surge information can only tell so much about a particular storm.

"As Hurricanes Kerry and Ike have clearly shown, major surges can occur from not particularly intense hurricanes," he noted.

John Roach is a contributing writer for NBC News. To learn more about him, check out his website. 

NASA/Jeff Schmaltz, MODIS Rapid Response Team, Goddard Space Flight Center

Hurricane Felicia, seen as a Category 1 hurricane by NASA's Terra satellite on Aug. 8, 2009. The storm had weakened from its peak strength as a Category 4 storm.

By Charles Choi, contributor, OurAmazingPlanet

Hurricanes generate sound waves detectable through the air thousands of miles away, which could be a good way to measure the wave conditions near these storms, a new study suggests.

Such findings could help improve models to predict and prepare for dangerous storms, the scientists behind the study said.

Hurricanes can generate winds of more than 160 mph (250 kph), whipping up the sea surface to waves up to 70 feet (20 meters) high. When one such ocean wave slams into an equally tall wave traveling in the opposite direction, the collision results in low-frequency sound waves in the atmosphere that scientific instruments can hear thousands of miles away. These infrasound signals are known as microbaroms.

"Signals of ocean waves were first observed in seismic records in the early 1900s and were considered noise to their earthquake signals," said researcher Kwok Fai Cheung, an ocean engineer at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. "In the 1940s, articles were published in scientific journals tracing the signals recorded in the middle of North America to marine storms. This is reinforced by a paper published by Russian scientists in the 1990s that traced the origin of infrasound signals recorded in Siberia to the hurricanes in the Pacific."

As hurricanes move, past studies revealed, waves they generated earlier in time will interact with ones they generate later. This produces a strong microbarom signal in the storm's wake. Indeed, it is possible "to hear storms making waves halfway across the globe," said researcher Justin Stopa, an ocean engineer also at the University of Hawaii at Manoa.

Storms signals
In principle, listening to microbaroms can help researchers continuously monitor ocean wave activity and track marine storms. "The strongest infrasound signals come from the storm center, which is the most dangerous portion of the hurricane," Stopa told OurAmazingPlanet.

However, regular surface ocean behavior generates microbaroms as well, including ocean swell, surface waves and other kinds of storms. To see if they could tell the difference between microbaroms from different sources, researchers used an International Monitoring System infrasound sensor array in Hawaii to monitor signals generated during the passage of Hurricanes Neki and Felicia in 2009. Neki peaked as a Category 3 tropical cyclone with maximum sustained wind speeds of 120 mph (194 kph), while Felicia peaked as a Category 4 tropical cyclone with maximum sustained wind speeds of 129 mph (208 kph). (Tropical cyclone is the generic term for hurricanes, tropical storms and typhoons.)

Using modeled wind speed data, the investigators simulated wave conditions during the hurricanes. These estimates served as the basis of an acoustic model to calculate microbarom activity.

The research team's predictions matched the microbarom signals the Hawaii sensor array detected. In fact, the scientists note the microbaroms from the hurricanes drowned out the much weaker signals from other phenomena.

Understanding hurricane behavior
The researchers are now extending their study to storms across the globe with the aid of French colleagues and are also investigating whether they can analyze extratropical storms and large-scale weather patterns in addition to hurricanes. (Extratropical storms are powered by the temperatures differences across a frontal system, whereas tropical storms are fueled by convection and warm tropical waters.)

"This combination of observations and simulated data will enable better understanding of marine storms, including hurricane behavior and our climate," Stopa said. "This will enable better models that have the ability to predict and mitigate hazards harmful to humankind." [ In Photos: Notorious Retired Hurricane Names ]

The models need further refinement, however, the researchers noted.

"There is much more work that needs to be done before infrasound measurements can be used as a forecasting tool," Cheung told OurAmazingPlanet. The atmosphere is a difficult environment to model how sound travels due to rapidly changing conditions there, which affect the density of air and thus the speed of sound through it. These new findings "represent a first step of this long process," Cheung said.

Stopa, Cheung and their colleagues Milton Garcés and Nickles Badger detailed their findings in the December issue of the Journal of Geophysical Research-Oceans.

Follow OurAmazingPlanet on Twitter @OAPlanet. We're also on Facebook and Google+.

• 50 Amazing Hurricane Facts
• Storm Season! How, When & Where Hurricanes Form
• The World's Weirdest Weather

© 2012 OurAmazingPlanet. All rights reserved. More from OurAmazingPlanet.