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Abstract Tropical cyclone (TC) hazards coupled with dense urban development along the coastline have resulted in trillions in US damages over the past several decades, with an increasing trend in losses in recent years. So far, this trend has been driven by increasing coastal development. However, as the climate continues to warm, changing TC climatology may also cause large changes in coastal damages in the future. Approaches to quantifying regional TC risk typically focus on total storm damage. However, it is crucial to understand the spatial footprint of TC damage and ultimately the spatial distribution of TC risk. Here, we quantify the magnitude and spatial pattern of TC risk (in expected annual damage) across the US from wind, storm surge, and rainfall using synthetic TCs, physics-based hazard models, and a county-level statistical damage model trained on historical TC data. We then combine end-of-century TC hazard simulations with US population growth and wealth increase scenarios (under the SSP2 4.5 emission scenario) to investigate the sensitivity of changes in TC risk across the US Atlantic and Gulf coasts. We find that not directly accounting for the effects of rainfall and storm surge results in much lower risk estimates and smaller future increases in risk. TC climatology change and socioeconomic change drive similar magnitude increases in total expected annual damage across the US (roughly 160%), and that their combined effect (633% increase) is much higher.
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Tropical cyclone-blackout-heatwave compound hazard resilience in a changing climate
Abstract Tropical cyclones (TCs) have caused extensive power outages. The impacts of TC-caused blackouts may worsen in the future as TCs and heatwaves intensify. Here we couple TC and heatwave projections and power outage and recovery process analysis to investigate how TC-blackout-heatwave compound hazard risk may vary in a changing climate, with Harris County, Texas as an example. We find that, under the high-emissions scenario RCP8.5, long-duration heatwaves following strong TCs may increase sharply. The expected percentage of Harris residents experiencing at least one longer-than-5-day TC-blackout-heatwave compound hazard in a 20-year period could increase dramatically by a factor of 23 (from 0.8% to 18.2%) over the 21 st century. We also reveal that a moderate enhancement of the power distribution network can significantly mitigate the compound hazard risk. Thus, climate adaptation actions, such as strategically undergrounding distribution network and developing distributed energy sources, are urgently needed to improve coastal power system resilience.
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- PAR ID:
- 10353310
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Nature Communications
- Volume:
- 13
- Issue:
- 1
- ISSN:
- 2041-1723
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-022-32018-4
