Comparison of today's vs. future tropical cyclone impacts using different sources of storm tracks in CLIMADA

• Main Author: Gevecke, Anna
• Other Authors: Meiler, Simona, Bresch, David N.
• Language: English
• Published: ETH Zurich 2022
• Subjects: Pacific; Indian; North Atlantic
• Online Access: https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11850/557568; https://doi.org/10.3929/ethz-b-000557568

Tropical Cyclones (TCs) affect economic, social, and environmental systems. About half of the meteorologically associated impacts are caused by TCs. In a changing climate, TCs are projected to intensify, and category 4 and 5 storms to occur more frequently. To adequately plan adaptation and mitigation measures, to prevent casualties and damage to private and public assets, an estimation of future impacts of TCs is desired. In this Master’s Thesis, we calculate the number of affected people and monetary damage of 100-yr TC events for the present and at the end of the 21st century in CLIMADA on global scale. We study a probabilistic set of TCs based on historical observations and scaled to represent future TC frequencies and intensities and synthetic TC datasets from a coupled statistical-dynamical TC model to compare TC impacts in four regions. The wind fields induced by modeled TCs constitute the hazard impacting the underlying exposure. Present exposure layers represent the population and assets of today. Future exposure layers are initialized using the socioeconomic development scenario corresponding to the worst-case climate change scenario. The impact functions, connecting the hazard intensity to the exposure, are defined as a step-function (threshold at 34 kn) for the number of people affected and regionally-calibrated sigmoid functions for the monetary damage. An uncertainty and sensitivity analysis is performed for the monetary damages. The number of affected people by the 100-yr TC event is projected to increase by contributions of socioeconomic development but decrease by contributions from climate change. The 100-yr TC event in the late 21st century is projected to affect more people in the North Atlantic and North Eastern Pacific region and fewer people in the North Western Pacific and Southern Hemisphere regions consistently over all TC datasets. In the North Indian Ocean region, the models project increasing and decreasing impacts depending on the TC dataset. The monetary damage is projected to ...