Temporal Fluctuations in Weather and Climate Extremes That Cause Economic and Human Health Impacts: A Review

Abstract

This paper reviews recent work on trends during this century in societal impacts (direct economic losses and fatalities) in the United States from extreme weather conditions and compares those with trends of associated atmospheric phenomena. Most measures of the economic impacts of weather and climate extremes over the past several decades reveal increasing losses. But trends in most related weather and climate extremes do not show comparable increases with time. This suggests that increasing losses are primarily due to increasing vulnerability arising from a variety of societal changes, including a growing population in higher risk coastal areas and large cities, more property subject to damage, and lifestyle and demographic changes subjecting lives and property to greater exposure. Flood damages and fatalities have generally increased in the last 25 years. While some have speculated that this may be due in part to a corresponding increase in the frequency of heavy rain events, the climate contribution to the observed impacts trends remains to be quantified. There has been a steady increase in hurricane losses. However, when changes in population, inflation, and wealth are considered, there is instead a downward trend. This is consistent with observations of trends in hurricane frequency and intensity. Increasing property losses due to thunderstorm-related phenomena (winds, hail, tornadoes) are explained entirely by changes in societal factors, consistent with the observed trends in the thunderstorm phenomena. Winter storm damages have increased in the last 10-15 years and this appears to be partially due to increases in the frequency of intense nor'easters. There is no evidence of changes in drought-related losses (although data are poor) and no apparent trend in climatic drought frequency. There is also no evidence of changes in the frequency of intense heat or cold waves.

Modeling Annual Extreme Precipitation in China Using the Generalized Extreme Value Distribution

“…Our method may also be used to predict the future behavior of extreme precipitation (Nadarajah and Choi 2003;Nadarajah 2005). Because the society has become more vulnerable to extreme precipitation due to population increase and economic growth (Kunkel et al 1999), the changing nature of return levels of extreme precipitation, should be taken into account for design practices and flood protection. The best fitting model was used to estimate the return levels for selected return periods (5, 10, 20, 50, 100, 200 and 500), for all of the four time series at each station.…”

“…Variations in frequency, and intensity of extreme weather events, greatly affect the human societies and their environments (Kunkel et al 1999). During the past 50 years, there have been frequent extreme precipitation events causing severe floods and damaging the economy and environment in China.…”

Changes in daily climate extremes in the eastern and central Tibetan Plateau during 1961–2005

“…At the same time, global climate change is expected to have a considerable impact on the global hydrological cycle. It has been seen that the economy, human health and the natural environment are becoming vulnerable to the extreme climate events [Easterling et al, 2000;Kunkel et al, 1999].…”

Changes in total precipitation, rainy days and extreme events in northeastern Italy

“…However, there are very few studies about this topic, probably because of the lack of high-quality daily data. Some studies were performed for the USA (Karl et al, 1995;Karl and Knight, 1998;Trenberth, 1998;Kunkel et al, 1999), Japan (Iwashima and Yamamoto, 1993), eastern and northeastern Australia (Suppiah and Hennessy, 1998;Hennessy et al, 1999;Plummer et al, 1999), South Africa (Mason et al, 1999), the UK (Osborn et al, 2000) and Italy (Brunetti et al, 2000c(Brunetti et al, , 2001. Karl et al (1995) and Karl and Knight (1998) observed a significant positive trend in the frequency of extreme rainfalls (greater than 50 mm per day) over the last few decades in the USA.…”