Analysis of Hurricane Extremes

Dear Colleagues,

Today, we are inundated with news about extreme weather events, and we are often living through some of them: record-breaking heat waves in Europe, devastating wild fires in the western United States, drought, catastrophic flooding in Europe and Pakistan, earthquakes, and extreme cold. Not too long ago, such catastrophic events were only seen in the movies. Who does not remember the movie, An Inconvenient Truth, based on Vice President Al Gore’s efforts to educate the world about the potential devastation that climate change and global warming could cause in the future? This was followed by movies such as the Contagion in 2011, which is about a pandemic, and Interstellar, about human beings living in a dust bowl caused by years of disregard for the environment. We were entertained by these last two movies and certainly did not think we would ever see such events in our lifetime. Unfortunately, we have been proven horribly wrong, and it seems that these days, we are living in a natural disaster movie. The COVID pandemic made its worldwide debut in 2020, claimed over 6 million lives, and still continues to cause disruptions. Other disasters soon followed, and in 2020, record-breaking wildfires, hurricanes, and flooding occurred, which accounted for at least USD 1 billion in damage in the US (https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/a-running-list-of-record-breaking-natural-disasters-in-2020/).

The trend continued in 2021 and 2022. The emergency event database EM-DAT recorded 432 catastrophic natural disasters worldwide ((https://reliefweb.int/report/world/2021-disasters-numbers). Examples include (but are not limited to) severe flooding in China, India, and Europe, tropical cyclones in Indonesia and the Philippines, and devastating winter storms in the United States. This year seems even worse. Europe saw record-breaking heat this summer, the US west coast is once again struggling with drought, and Pakistan was devastated by floods.  

It is clear that extreme events come with enormous financial and human costs. To protect us from financial hardships caused by these events, we purchase insurance. Insurance companies then take out reinsurance to protect themselves and must have sufficient reserves to ensure solvency.  This is especially true when it comes to insuring against hurricanes. In recent years, the losses from hurricanes on the east coast of the US have tended to be catastrophic.  Hurricane Katrina in 2005 remains the costliest hurricane (https://www.iii.org/fact-statistic/facts-statistics-hurricanes) on record, with damages estimated to have been over USD 89 billion (CPI-adjusted for 2021), but recent hurricanes have caused significant damage as well. Examples include Hurricane Ida in 2021 at USD 36 billion, Hurricane Maria in 2017 at USD 32.4 billion (2021 CPI-adjusted) and Hurricane Harvey in 2017 at USD 33.1 billion (CPI-adjusted). As a result, interest in estimating and predicting hurricane losses (both average and extreme) has been rising. The scientific literature is rife with papers regarding the prediction and estimation of hurricane losses; however, these are scattered in different journals. This Special Issue is an attempt to bridge this gap and gather recent groundbreaking work regarding the analysis if extreme hurricane losses in one place.

Prof. Dr. Sneh Gulati
Guest Editor

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• hurricane extremes
• tropical cyclone
• extreme weather events