Pielke's Weekly Memo #19
A sneak peek at normalized U.S. hurricane losses 1900 to 2022
With the 2022 Atlantic hurricane in the books, I can now update our time series of normalized (continental) U.S. hurricane damage. This is a dataset that I and colleagues have been working on for decades (our first paper was published in 1998 and our most recent in 2018).
You can read about our methods and their application through 2021 in this post that I wrote in September right after Hurricane Ian made landfall in Florida. In today’s post I provide a preliminary look at the normalization time series updated through 2022, including an estimate of Hurricane Ian’s losses. Of note, for the first time since I’ve been tracking the time series the trend since 1900 has changed sign.
After the jump you’ll find four graphs and some commentary: (1) Inflation-only adjusted damage from1900-2022, (2) billion-dollar hurricane counts 1900-2019, (3) normalized U.S. hurricane damage from 1900-2022, and (4) how insured losses 1900-2022 are estimated based on a proprietary catastrophe model. I also provide ungated links to our relevant papers.
You think the past two decades have seen large losses? Wait until you see 1920s-1960s. Plus I have some fun with billion-dollar disasters.
Enjoy!