This article suggests that the insurance industry's increased recognition of the economic implications of climate change, as evidenced by the industry's desire to use updated hurricane models that account for global warming in the rate setting process, will enable insurers to make more accurate estimates of their losses but only if state insurance regulators step up to the challenge of understanding and scrutinizing the models. The article briefly discusses how states are empowered to regulate the insurance industry and influence its rate setting approaches. The article then discusses the major approaches to rate setting and highlights the inaccuracy that is characteristic of the traditional approaches. It also discusses the primary obstacle to increased usage of modeling in the rate setting process- state insurance regulators, who are concerned for consumer protection, fear insurers will use the proprietary nature of the models to hide the fact that they are charging unjustifiably high premiums for insurance. Next the article shows, through a case study from Massachusetts, how this fear can be addressed. The paper further discusses how proactive measures to encourage more widespread understanding and usage of the models will contribute to a more financially stable insurance industry that can withstand climate change and enable homeowners to make better long-term decisions about where they want to live and how they want their homes to be constructed.
This book provides research that shows tropical cyclones are more powerful than in the past with the most dramatic increases occurring over the North Atlantic and with the strongest hurricanes. Although such increases are correlated with warming oceans and are consistent with the thermodynamic theory of hurricane intensity, there remains doubt about the interpretation, integrity, and meaning of these results. Arising from the 5th International Summit on Hurricanes and Climate Change, this book contains new research on topics related to hurricanes and climate change. Bringing together international leading academics and researchers on various sides of the debate, the book discusses new research and expresses opinions about what is happening and what might happen in the future with regard to regional and global hurricane (tropical cyclone) activity.
This book represents recent research on tropical cyclones and their impact, and a wide range of topics are covered. An updated global climatology is presented, including the global occurrence of tropical cyclones and the terrestrial factors that may contribute to the variability and long-term trends in their occurrence. Research also examines long term trends in tropical cyclone occurrences and intensity as related to solar activity, while other research discusses the impact climate change may have on these storms. The dynamics and structure of tropical cyclones are studied, with traditional diagnostics employed to examine these as well as more modern approaches in examining their thermodynamics. The book aptly demonstrates how new research into short-range forecasting of tropical cyclone tracks and intensities using satellite information has led to significant improvements. In looking at societal and ecological risks, and damage assessment, authors investigate the use of technology for anticipating, and later evaluating, the amount of damage that is done to human society, watersheds, and forests by land-falling storms. The economic and ecological vulnerability of coastal regions are also studied and are supported by case studies which examine the potential hazards related to the evacuation of populated areas, including medical facilities. These studies provide decision makers with a potential basis for developing improved evacuation techniques.
Recent studies suggest that tropical cyclones are more powerful than in the past with the most dramatic increase in the North Atlantic. The increase is correlated with an increase in ocean temperature. A debate concerns the nature of these increases with some scientists attributing them to a natural climate fluctuation and others suggesting climate change related to anthropogenic increases in forcing from greenhouse gases. A Summit on Hurricanes and Climate Change was held during the spring of 2007 on the island of Crete that brought together leading academics and researchers on both sides of the scientific debate to discuss new research and express opinions about what will happen in the future with regard to hurricane activity. This proceedings volume highlights the state-of-the-science research into various aspects of the hurricane-climate connection. It is likely that the science presented here will lead to new research that will help answer crucial questions about our sustainable future.
Coastal Louisiana and Mississippi are especially prone to large hurricanes due to their geographic location in the north-central Gulf of Mexico. Several recent hurricanes have devastated the region, creating complicated environments of waves and storm surge. Katrina (2005) and Gustav (2008) made landfall in southeastern Louisiana, and their counter-clockwise winds pushed surge onto the Louisiana-Mississippi continental shelf, into the low-lying wetlands surrounding the Mississippi River, and over and through the levee system that protects metropolitan New Orleans. Rita (2005) and Ike (2008) passed farther to the west, moved across the Texas-Louisiana continental shelf, and created surge that flooded large portions of southwestern Louisiana. These hurricanes demand detailed hindcasts that depict the evolution of waves and surge during these storm events. These hindcasts can be used to map the likely floodplains for insurance purposes, to understand how the current protection system responded during each storm, and to design a new protection system that will resist better the waves and surge. In addition, the resulting computational model can be used to forecast the system's response to future storm events. The work described herein represents a significant step forward in the modeling of hurricane waves and surge in complicated nearshore environments. The system is resolved with unprecedented levels of detail, including mesh sizes of 1km on the continental shelf, less than 200m in the wave breaking zones and inland, and down to 20-30m in the fine-scale rivers and channels. The resulting hindcasts are incredibly accurate, with close matches between the modeled results and the measured high-water marks and hydrograph data. They can be trusted to provide a faithful representation of the evolution of waves and surge during all four hurricanes. This work also describes advancements in the coupling of wave and surge models. This coupling has been implemented typically with heterogeneous meshes, which is disadvantageous because it requires intra-model interpolation at the boundaries of the nested, structured wave meshes and inter-model interpolation between the wave and circulation meshes. The recent introduction of unstructured wave models makes nesting unnecessary. The unstructured-mesh SWAN wave and ADCIRC circulation models are coupled in this work so that they run on the same unstructured mesh. This identical, homogeneous mesh allows the physics of wave- circulation interactions to be resolved correctly in both models. The unstructured mesh can be applied on a large domain to follow seamlessly all energy from deep to shallow water. There is no nesting or overlapping of structured wave meshes, and there is no inter-model interpolation. Variables and forces reside at identical, vertex-based locations. Information can be passed without interpolation, thus reducing significantly the communication costs. The coupled SWAN+ADCIRC model is highly scalable and integrates seamlessly the physics and numerics from deep ocean to shelf to floodplain. Waves, water levels and currents are allowed to interact in complex problems and in a way that is accurate and efficient to thousands of computational cores. The coupled model is validated against extensive measurements of waves and surge during the four recent Gulf hurricanes. Furthermore, the coupling paradigm employed by SWAN+ADCIRC does not interfere with the already-excellent scalability of the component models, and the coupled model maintains its scalability to 7,168 computational cores. SWAN+ADCIRC is well-suited for the simulation of hurricane waves and surge.
This book is based upon presentations at an historical symposium on hurricanes convened by the American Geophysical Union at its Fall meeting in San Francisco, December 16, 2000".
The thesis work was in two major parts: development and testing of a new approach to detecting and tracking tropical cyclones in climate models; and application of an extreme value statistical approach to enable assessment of changes in weather extremes from climate models. The tracking algorithm applied a creative phase-space approach to differentiate between modeled tropical cyclones and their mid-latitude cousins. A feature here was the careful attention to sensitivity to choice of selection parameters, which is considerable. The major finding was that the changes over time were relatively insensitive to these details. This new approach will improve and add confidence to future assessments of climate impacts on hurricanes. The extremes approach utilized the Generalized Pareto Distribution (one of the standard approaches to statistics of extremes) applied to present and future hurricane distributions as modeled by a regional climate model, then applied the changes to current observations to extract the changes in the extremes. Since climate models cannot resolve these extremes directly, this provides an excellent method of determining weather extremes in general. This is of considerable societal importance as we are most vulnerable to such extremes and knowledge of their changes enables improved planning and adaptation strategies.
