Historic and Future Ice Storms

Abstract:

Ice storm losses from business interruption as well as transportation and health damages can range into billions of dollars. For instance, the December 2008 New England and Upstate New York ice storm caused four deaths and monetary damages between $2.5 and 3.7 billion, and the 2008 Chinese winter storms resulted in over 130 deaths and over $20 billion in damages. Informal discussions with ice storm experts indicate that due to competing temperature and precipitation effects as well as local topographic effects, it is unclear how exactly climate change will affect ice storms. Here we ask how incident frequencies might change in a future climate at four weather stations prone to ice storms. Using historical atmospheric soundings, we conduct a thought experiment where we perturb the temperatures as might be expected in a future climate. We then discuss changes in monthly frequency of ice storms.