Science Source

Normalized US hurricane damage estimates using area of total destruction, 1900−2018

Finds that hurricanes are becoming more damaging and that the frequency of the very most damaging hurricanes has increased at a rate of 330% per century due, primarily, to global warming
States that hurricanes are the most destructive natural disasters in the United States and the record of economic damage from hurricanes shows a steep positive trend dominated by increases in wealth
This study accounts for temporal changes in exposed wealth, in a process called normalization, before comparing the destructiveness of recorded damaging storms from different areas and at different times
Atmospheric models predict major hurricanes to get more intense as Earth warms, and we expect this trend to eventually emerge above the natural variability in the record of normalized damage.
States, however, that the evidence for an increasing trend in normalized damage since 1900 has been controversial
Develops a record of normalized damage since 1900 based on an equivalent area of total destruction
Shows that this record has an improved signal-to-noise ratio over earlier normalization schemes based on calculations of present-day economic damage
Reveals an emergent positive trend in damage and attributes this to a detectable change in extreme storms due to global warming
Shows that this increasing trend in damage can also be exposed in existing normalized damage records by looking at the frequency of the largest damage events
Concludes that the record of normalized damage, framed in terms of an equivalent area of total destruction, is a more reliable measure for climate-related changes in extreme weather, and can be used for better risk assessments on hurricane disasters