Forecasting Total Hurricane Damage to U S economy from Meteorological

Data.

Introduction
From 1950’s till date, there have been 68 Hurricanes in the US (57 Atlantic, 1 Extra Tropical, 10
Pacific) that have crossed the 1 Billion US$ damage in Nominal terms. However, since the
damage of Hurricanes thus reported and studied have been on nominal basis, yearly costs not
indexed to current prices, and considering a recent report of a constant bias downwards of 10-
15% in reported data, there could be potentially more damaging Hurricanes which are outside
the scope of present study. Costs, again are to be understood as a biased downwards estimate of
the Actual Costs.
As a result of global warming, the landfall and impact of these cyclones have expanded,
motivating the understanding of Costs to the economy, particularly stakeholders (Businesses,
Residents, Insurers, Governments, Policy makers, Disaster and Emergency Services etc.) in
vulnerable areas. Worth mention is Researchers in Stiftelsen for industriell og teknisk forskning,
SINTEF, Norwey containing that viable technologies exist to contain Hurricanes, by inserting
Cooling Pipes at targeted locations in Trans-Atlantic. To manage, design and Invest in such
technology again requires knowledge, particularly in Economic discourse, predicting the
increasing costs as a function of physically predictable/ measurable meteorological variables.
This paper follows the methodology built in (Blake & Gibney, 2011) and (Jaeho, 2014).

Data and Variables

Seven meteorological variables were used: maximum sustained winds at landfall, pressure of
the circulation at landfall, maximum observed storm surge from the storm, maximum sustained
winds from the lifetime of the system, minimum central pressure from the lifetime of the
system, confirmed tornadoes spawned by the system, and the latitude of landfall. Since Storm
Surge is potentially endogenous, it has been instrumented using min pressure which is not
statistically significant in explaining damage. Data can be obtained from National Hurricane
Center, a wing of National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration at
https://coast.noaa.gov/hurricanes/ . Basically, all Pacific and Atlantic winds do not qualify as
Hurricanes. The Selection criterion towards being a major hurricane is a category 3, 4, or 5
hurricanes or Extra Tropical Hurricanes on the Saffir/Simpson Hurricane Wind Scale based on
the variable maximum of 1-minute sustained wind speeds (measured in miles per hour). This is
further selected/dropped subject to the economic damage levels of minimum 1 Billion $.
Although the meteorological observations are known to be sufficiently independent this is a
limitation of this study to be applied to smaller storms for example.

Category Wind
Speed
(mph)

1
 Storms <73

Hurricanes

1 74-95

2 96-110

3 111-130

4 131-155

5 >155

The version of Hurricane data mentioned in (Blake & Gibney, 2011) has only 38 cyclones made
available by NOAA. Recent advances in Hurricane study and Artificial intelligence however, lets
the researcher get more detailed insight into the Hurricanes. Google Search and WikiPedia for
example, provide comprehensive information regarding speed and nominal costs of Hurricanes
in Pacific and Atlantic.

Using minimal technology like HTML DOM parsing and any scripting interface eg. Vba (that we
use) or C#, it is possible to scrape most of the information, reducing costs of obtaining such
information to a pragmatic level.

Methodology

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