Normalized hurricane damage in the continental United States 1900–2017

Abstract

A normalization estimates damage from an historical extreme event were that same event to occur under contemporary societal conditions. This paper provides a major update the leading dataset on normalized US hurricane losses in the continental United States from 1900 to 2017. Over this period, hurricanes caused $1.9 trillion in normalized (2017) damage, or just over $16.1 billion annually.Landfalling hurricanes in the continental United States (CONUS) are responsible for more than 2/3 of global catastrophe losses since 1980, according to data from Munich Re, a global reinsurance company. 1 The management of economic risks associated with hurricanes largely relies on "catastrophe models" which estimate losses from modeled storms in the context of contemporary data on exposure and vulnerability. 2,3 As a complement to such model-based approaches, an empirical approach to hurricane risk estimation has been employed since 1998, called "normalization." 4,5 A normalization estimates damage of an historical extreme event were it to occur under contemporary societal conditions. Normalization methodologies are widely

Surface Pressure a More Skillful Predictor of Normalized Hurricane Damage than Maximum Sustained Wind

“…Normalization provides an estimate of how much damage an historical hurricane would hypothetically cause if it were to make landfall today given current levels of exposure and wealth. We use the Pielke-Landsea (PL18) normalization method discussed in Weinkle et al (2018) which adjusts for population, inflation and wealth per capita. This dataset is available from 1900-2017.…”

“…Multiple landfalls from the same hurricane were included whenever the normalized hurricane damage dataset (Weinkle et al 2018) had a separate damage estimate for an additional landfall. There were a total of nine hurricanes where damage from a second landfall was provided.…”

“…There were a total of nine hurricanes where damage from a second landfall was provided. There were also nine hurricanes where separate landfalls were identified by Klotzbach et al (2018), who used a 100 mile threshold between landfalls to identify multiple distinct landfalls by the same hurricane, but did not include a separate normalized damage estimate. In these cases, we selected the first landfall as its landfalling V max and MSLP, assuming that the two separate landfalls were of approximately equal intensity.…”

“…The only difference is that this dataset only provides the V max and MSLP intensity at the time of a hurricane's strongest landfall, as opposed to the former dataset which provides intensity information for all hurricane landfalls. The blend of these two AOML landfalling hurricane datasets was also recently employed in Klotzbach et al (2018). We note that nine hurricanes in our landfalling hurricane dataset had MSLP calculated from a V max /MSLP relationship as opposed to a direct measurement of MSLP.…”

Moral Hazard vs. Land Scarcity: Flood Management Policies for the Real World

“…Economic losses due to natural disasters -and especially floods -are increasing, mostly because of increases in population and wealth in urban areas (Pielke et al 2008;Neumayer and Barthel 2011;Hallegatte 2017;Hoeppe 2016;Weinkle et al 2018;Paprotny et al 2018). Many have called for resolute action to reduce flood losses (e.g., Kunreuther, Michel-Kerjan, and Doherty 2011).…”