Recent Changes in the Occurrences and Damages of Floods and Droughts in the United States

Abstract

Abstract:In this study, we compile and analyse 136,920 records of flood and 50,967 records of drought from a survey-based database to investigate recent changes in annual occurrence and economical cost in the United States. Results show that an average of 6520 floods has occurred per year during 1996-2016, with annual mean economic losses up to 3986 million US dollars, while 2427 drought events/year are recorded causing an average loss of 1684 million US dollars per year. Importantly, we found there is no evident changing tendency in annual economic damages of floods and droughts, despite an upward trend in their annual occurrences. This could be partly explained by changes in regional vulnerabilities, as indirectly reflected by the ratio of damaging events to total number of events experienced and the average damage per event. Spatially, vulnerability to droughts has decreased in most of the country, while increased vulnerability to floods is observed in a number of states. Despite limitations from the records and incomplete characterization of vulnerability, this study has great implications for targeted mitigation and adaptation, through identifying the regions that are most vulnerable to floods and droughts respectively and highlighting the contrasting patterns in regional vulnerability to floods and droughts.

A pan-African high-resolution drought index dataset

“…Drought is a complex phenomenon that affects natural environments and socioeconomic systems in the world (von Hardenberg et al, 2001;Vicente-Serrano, 2007;Van Loon, 2015; Wilhite and Pulwarty, 2017). Impacts include crop failure, food shortage, famine, epidemics and even mass migration (Wilhite et al, 2007;Ding et al, 2011;Zhou et al, 2018). In recent years, severe events have occurred across the world, such as the 2003 central Europe drought (García-Herrera et al, 2010), the 2010 Russian drought (Spinoni et al, 2015), the 2011 Horn of Africa drought (Nicholson, 2014), the 2000 drought in southeastern Australia (van Dijk et al, 2013;Peng et al, 2019c), the 2013-2014 California drought (Swain et al, 2014), the 2014 North China drought (Wang and He, 2015) and the 2015-2017 southern Africa drought (Baudoin et al, 2017;Muller, 2018).…”

“…These observations may either come from ground-based station data or gridded data, such as satellite and reanalysis datasets. For example, the SPEIbase (Beguería et al, 2010) and the Global Precipitation Climatology Centre Drought Index (GPCC-DI) (Ziese et al, 2014) both provide SPEI datasets at a global scale. SPEIbase provides gridded SPEI with a 50 km spatial resolution and is calculated from Climatic Research Unit (CRU) Time Series (TS) datasets, which are produced based on measurements from more than 4000 ground-based weather stations across the world (Harris et al, 2014).…”

A Study on Climate-Driven Flash Flood Risks in the Boise River Watershed, Idaho

“…Recent studies show that the global climate cycle will create and intensify more severe frequent floods in many regions, resulting in threats to the reliability and resiliency of water resources infrastructure [10,11]. Many previous studies have investigated long-term hydrologic variability associated with climate change [12][13][14][15].…”

A pan-African high-resolution drought index dataset

“…Impacts include crop failure, food shortage, famine, epidemics and even mass migration (Ding et al, 2011;Wilhite et al, 2007;Zhou et al, 2018). In recent years, severe events have occurred across the world, such as the 2003 central Europe drought (García-Herrera et al, 2010), the 2010 Russian drought (Spinoni et al, 2015), the 2011 Horn of Africa drought (Nicholson, 2014), the southeast Australian's Millennium drought (van Dijk et al, 2013), the 2013/2014 California drought (Swain et al, 2014), the 2014 North China drought (Wang and He, 2015) and the 2015-2017 Southern Africa drought (Baudoin et al, 2017;Muller, 2018).…”