As human-driven climate change amplifies natural disasters, hurricanes and typhoons stand to increase in intensity.
As human-driven climate change amplifies natural disasters, hurricanes and typhoons stand to increase in intensity. Until now, there existed very few freely available computer models designed to estimate the economic costs of such events, but a team of researchers led by Jane W. Baldwin at the University of California, Irvine recently announced the completion of an open-source model that stands to help countries with high tropical cyclone risks better calculate just how much those storms will impact their people and their economies.
“Tropical cyclones are some of the most impactful natural disasters on Earth. They pose huge risks to both human life and the built environment, so they have large economic costs associated with them and cause a lot of deaths,” said Baldwin, a professor in the UCI Department of Earth System Science and the lead author of the new paper in the American Meteorological Society journal Weather, Climate, and Society. “We need to be able to quantitatively explain their risk, meaning the probability of seeing different levels of losses.”
The economic risk model the team built extends an existing global tropical cyclone model, called the “Columbia tropical cyclone hazard” model. The economic risk model is prototyped for the Philippines but is straightforwardly customizable to any part of the world where stakeholders want to understand the storm risks they face.
Read more at: University of California - Irvine
Jane Baldwin, UC Irvine professor of Earth system science, says, “Tropical cyclones are some of the most impactful natural disasters on Earth. They pose huge risks to both human life and the built environment, so they have large economic costs associated with them and cause a lot of deaths. We need to be able to quantitatively explain their risk, meaning the probability of seeing different levels of losses.” (Photo Credit: Steve Zylius / UCI)
