Convective Storms and the Insurance Industry: Challenges and Opportunities

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kirsten D. Orwig
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Tropical Cyclones ◽  
Insurance Industry ◽  
Property Values ◽  
Construction Materials ◽  
The United States ◽  
Building Code ◽  
Convective Storms ◽  
Challenges And Opportunities ◽  
Insured Loss

Convective storms affect countries worldwide, with billions in losses and dozens of fatalities every year. They are now the key insured loss driver in the United States, even after considering the losses sustained by tropical cyclones in 2017. Since 2008, total insured losses from convective storms have exceeded $10 billion per year. Additionally, these losses continue to increase year over year. Key loss drivers include increased population, buildings, vehicles, and property values. However, other loss drivers relate to construction materials and practices, as well as building code adoption and enforcement. The increasing loss trends pose a number of challenges for the insurance industry and broader society. These challenges are discussed, and some recommendations are presented.

scholarly journals Forecasting High-Impact Weather in Landfalling Tropical Cyclones Using a Warn-on-Forecast System

2019 ◽  
Vol 100 (8) ◽  
pp. 1405-1417 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas Jones ◽  
Patrick Skinner ◽  
Nusrat Yussouf ◽  
Kent Knopfmeier ◽  
Anthony Reinhart ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Tropical Cyclones ◽  
Rapid Evolution ◽  
The United States ◽  
Significant Loss ◽  
Loss Of Life ◽  
Convective Storms ◽  
The Public ◽  
High Impact Weather ◽  
Landfalling Tropical Cyclones

AbstractLandfalling tropical cyclones (TCs) are among the greatest natural threats to life and property in the United States, since they can produce multiple hazards associated with convective storms over a wide region. Of these hazards, tornadoes within TC rainbands pose a particularly difficult forecast problem owing to their rapid evolution and their frequent occurrence coincident with additional hazards, such as flash flooding and damaging winds. During the 2017 Atlantic hurricane season, Hurricanes Harvey and Irma impacted the continental United States, causing significant loss of life and billions of dollars in property damage. Application of the Warn-on-Forecast (WoF) concept of short-term, probabilistic guidance of convective hazards (Stensrud et al. 2009, 2013), including the potential for tornadoes within TCs, offers the ability to provide forecasters with valuable tools for prioritizing the relative risk from multiple convective threats and effectively communicating them to the public.

scholarly journals Assessing the influence of an extended hurricane season on inland flooding potential in the Southeast United States

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Monica H. Stone ◽  
Sagy Cohen
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Tropical Cyclones ◽  
Climate Warming ◽  
Global Climate ◽  
River Basins ◽  
The United States ◽  
Southeast United States ◽  
Global Climate Warming ◽  
Hurricane Season ◽  
Near Future

Abstract. Recent tropical cyclones, like Hurricane Katrina, have been some of the worst the United States has experienced. Tropical cyclones are expected to intensify, bringing about 20 % more precipitation, in the near future in response to global climate warming. Further, global climate warming may extend the hurricane season. This study focuses on four major river basins (Neches, Pearl, Mobile, and Roanoke) in the Southeast United States that are frequently impacted by tropical cyclones. An analysis of the timing of tropical cyclones that impact these river basins found that most occur during the low discharge season, and thus rarely produce riverine flooding conditions. However, an extension of the current hurricane season of June–November, due to global climate warming, could encroach upon the high discharge seasons in these basins, increasing the susceptibility for riverine hurricane-induced flooding. This analysis shows that an extension of the hurricane season to May–December (just 2 months longer) increased the number of days that would be at risk to flooding were the average tropical cyclone to occur by 37–258 %, depending on the timing of the hurricane season in relation to the high discharge seasons on these rivers. Future research should aim to extend this analysis to all river basins in the United States that are impacted by tropical cyclones in order to provide a bigger picture of which areas are likely to experience the worst increases in flooding risk due to a probable extension of the hurricane season with expected global climate change in the near future.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emily Abrams Ansari
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Cold War ◽  
The United States ◽  
American Identity ◽  
American Composers ◽  
The Us ◽  
Challenges And Opportunities ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Changing Attitudes

The introduction provides an overview of the history of musical Americanism, from the 1920s to the 1970s, in tandem with an assessment of changing attitudes toward American identity in the United States. It introduces scholarly debates surrounding the Cold War politicization of serialism and tonality and describes the various opportunities for work with government exploited by American composers during the 1950s and 1960s. These opportunities included serving as advisers to the State Department, the US Information Agency, and organizations funded by the CIA, as well as touring overseas as government-funded cultural ambassadors. These contexts establish the basis for the book’s argument that the Cold War presented both challenges and opportunities for Americanist composers that would ultimately result in a rebranding of their style.

scholarly journals Coastal Resilience Against Storm Surge from Tropical Cyclones

Atmosphere ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (7) ◽  
pp. 725
Author(s):  
Robert Mendelsohn ◽  
Liang Zheng
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Probability Distribution ◽  
Tropical Cyclones ◽  
Storm Surge ◽  
Urban Areas ◽  
Storm Surges ◽  
The United States ◽  
Atlantic Seaboard ◽  
Order Of Magnitude ◽  
Coastal Resilience

It is well known that seawalls are effective at stopping common storm surges in urban areas. This paper examines whether seawalls should be built to withstand the storm surge from a major tropical cyclone. We estimate the extra cost of building the wall tall enough to stop such surges and the extra flood benefit of this additional height. We estimate the surge probability distribution from six tidal stations spread along the Atlantic seaboard of the United States. We then measure how valuable the vulnerable buildings behind a 100 m wall must be to justify such a tall wall at each site. Combining information about the probability distribution of storm surge, the average elevation of protected buildings, and the damage rate at each building, we find that the value of protected buildings behind this 100 m wall must be in the hundreds of millions to justify the wall. We also examine the additional flood benefit and cost of protecting a km2 of land in nearby cities at each site. The density of buildings in coastal cities in the United States are generally more than an order of magnitude too low to justify seawalls this high. Seawalls are effective, but not at stopping the surge damage from major tropical cyclones.

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