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Natural hazards such as hurricanes, floods, and wildfires cause devastating socio-economic impacts on communities. In South Florida, most of these hazards are becoming increasingly frequent and severe because of the warming climate, and changes in vulnerability and exposure, resulting in significant damage to infrastructure, homes, and businesses. To better understand the drivers of these impacts, we developed a bottom-up impact-based methodology that takes into account all relevant drivers for different types of hazards. We identify the specific drivers that co-occurred with socio-economic impacts and determine whether these extreme events were caused by single or multiple hydrometeorological drivers (i.e., compound events). We consider six types of natural hazards: hurricanes, severe storm/thunderstorms, floods, heatwaves, wildfire, and winter weather. Using historical, socio-economic loss data along with observations and reanalysis data for hydrometeorological drivers, we analyze how often these drivers contributed to the impacts of natural hazards in South Florida. We find that for each type of hazard, the relative importance of the drivers varies depending on the severity of the event. For example, wind speed is a key driver of the socio-economic impacts of hurricanes, while precipitation is a key driver of the impacts of flooding. We find that most of the high-impact events in South Florida were compound events, where multiple drivers contributed to the occurrences and impacts of the events. For example, more than 50% of the recorded flooding events were compound events and these contributed to 99% of total property damages and 98% of total crop damages associated with flooding in Miami-Dade County. Our results provide valuable insights into the drivers of natural hazard impacts in South Florida and can inform the development of more effective risk reduction strategies for improving the preparedness and resilience of the region against extreme events. Our bottom-up impact-based methodology can be applied to other regions and hazard types, allowing for more comprehensive and accurate assessments of the impacts of compound hazards.
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This content will become publicly available on February 25, 2026
Multivariate compound events drive historical floods and associated losses along the U.S. East and Gulf coasts
Compound flooding events are a threat to many coastal regions and can have widespread socio-economic implications. However, their frequency of occurrence, underlying flood drivers, and direct link to past socio-economic losses are largely unknown despite being key to supporting risk and adaptation assessments. Here, we present an impact-based analysis of compound flooding for 203 coastal counties along the U.S. Gulf and East coasts by combining data from multiple flood drivers and socio-economic loss information from 1980 to 2018. We find that ~80% of all flood events recorded in our study area were compound rather than univariate. In addition, we show that historical compound flooding events in most counties were driven by more than two flood drivers (hydrological, meteorological, and/or oceanographic) and distinct spatial clusters exist that exhibit variability in the underlying driver of compound flood events. Furthermore, we find that in more than 80% of the counties, over 80% of recorded property and crop losses were linked to compound flooding. Nearly 80% of counties have a higher median loss from compound than univariate events. For these counties, the median property loss is over 26 times greater, and the median crop loss is over 76 times greater for compound events on average. Our analysis overcomes some of the limitations of previous compound-event studies based on pre-defined flood drivers and offers new insights into the complex relationship between hazards and associated socio-economic impacts.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2103754
- PAR ID:
- 10610299
- Publisher / Repository:
- Springer Nature
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- npj Natural Hazards
- Volume:
- 2
- Issue:
- 1
- ISSN:
- 2948-2100
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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