Projecting global tropical cyclone economic damages with validation of tropical cyclone economic damage model

Abstract:

Tropical cyclones (TCs) sometimes cause serious damages to human society and thus possible changes of TC properties in the future have been concerned. In fact, the Fifth Assessment Report (AR5) by IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) mentions likely increasing in intensity and rain rate of TCs. In addition, future change of socioeconomic condition (e.g. population growth) might worsen TC impacts in the future. Thereby, in this study, we developed regression models to estimate economic damages by TCs (hereafter TC damage model), and employed those models to project TC economic damages under several future climate and socioeconomic scenarios.

We developed the TC damage models for each of 4 regions; western North Pacific, North American, North Indian, and Southern Hemisphere. The inputs for TC damage model are tropical cyclone central pressure, populations in the area exposed by tropical cyclone wind, and GDP (Gross Domestic Product) per capita. The TC damage models we firstly developed tended to overestimate very low damages and also underestimate very high damages. Thereby we modified structure of TC damage models to improve model performance, and then executed extensive validation of the model. The modified model presented better performance in estimating very low and high TC damages. After the modification and validation of the model, we determined the structure of TC damage models and projected TC economic damages. The result indicated increase in TC economic damage in global scale, while TC economic damage against world GDP would decrease in the future, which result is consistent with previous study.