Climate and solar signals in property damage losses from hurricanes affecting the United States

Thomas Jagger (), James Elsner () and R. Burch ()

Natural Hazards: Journal of the International Society for the Prevention and Mitigation of Natural Hazards, 2011, vol. 58, issue 1, 557 pages

Abstract: The authors show that historical property damage losses from US hurricanes contain climate signals. The methodology is based on a statistical model that combines a specification for the number of loss events with a specification for the amount of loss per event. Separate models are developed for annual and extreme losses. A Markov chain Monte Carlo procedure is used to generate posterior samples from the models. Results indicate the chance of at least one loss event increases when the springtime north–south surface pressure gradient over the North Atlantic is weaker than normal, the Atlantic ocean is warmer than normal, El Niño is absent, and sunspots are few. However, given at least one loss event, the magnitude of the loss per annum is related only to ocean temperature. The 50-year return level for a loss event is largest under a scenario featuring a warm Atlantic Ocean, a weak North Atlantic surface pressure gradient, El Niño, and few sunspots. The work provides a framework for anticipating hurricane losses on seasonal and multi-year time scales. Copyright Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2011

Keywords: Hurricanes; Property damage; Loss model; Environment; Risk compound Poisson; MCMC (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2011
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1007/s11069-010-9685-4 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:nathaz:v:58:y:2011:i:1:p:541-557

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/economics/journal/11069

DOI: 10.1007/s11069-010-9685-4

Access Statistics for this article

Natural Hazards: Journal of the International Society for the Prevention and Mitigation of Natural Hazards is currently edited by Thomas Glade, Tad S. Murty and Vladimír Schenk

More articles in Natural Hazards: Journal of the International Society for the Prevention and Mitigation of Natural Hazards from Springer, International Society for the Prevention and Mitigation of Natural Hazards
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().