Toward a more effective hurricane hazard communication

Abstract

Tropical cyclones are among the most devastating natural disasters that pose risk to people and assets all around the globe. The Saffir-Simpson scale is commonly used to inform threatened communities about the severity of hazard, but lacks consideration of other potential drivers of a hazardous situation (e.g. terrestrial and coastal flooding). Here, we propose an alternative approach that accounts for multiple components and their likelihood of coincidence for appropriate characterization of hurricane hazard. We assess the marginal and joint probability of wind-speed and rainfall from landfalling Atlantic tropical cyclones in the United States between 1979 ∼ 2017 to characterize the hazard associated with these events. We then integrate the vulnerability of affected communities to have a better depiction of risk that is comparable to the actual cost of these hurricanes. Our results show that the multihazard indexing approach significantly better characterizes the hurricane hazard, and is more appropriate for risk-informed decision-making.

Drought Vulnerability in the United States: An Integrated Assessment

“…Although numerous studies have estimated different aspects of vulnerability to more visually damaging hazards in the U.S., such as tornadoes [10][11][12], hurricanes [13,14], and floods [15][16][17][18][19], there is not yet any comprehensive assessment of drought vulnerability in the U.S.…”

Unraveling the Relationship Between Tropical Storms and Agricultural Drought

“…Whereas, Song et al. (2020) identified that rainfall is not always proportional to the wind scale of the TC and therefore, in some cases TS events may accompany more rainfall relative to TC. Moreover, a plethora of studies have looked into TC weakening the drought intensity while drought worsened despite the presence of TC has received less attention.…”

Simulated Changes in Tropical Cyclone Size, Accumulated Cyclone Energy and Power Dissipation Index in a Warmer Climate

“…While the Saffir-Simpson category scale is routinely used to communicate to the public the imminent danger posed by tropical cyclones, more comprehensive alternative scales have been proposed but not widely adopted [26][27][28]. While interpreted by the impact of selected damage types, the Saffir-Simpson scale is actually defined by 1 min average peak near surface wind exceedances over fixed thresholds.…”