A STATISTICAL DETERMINISTIC APPROACH TO HURRICANE RISK ASSESSMENT

Hurricanes are lethal and costly phenomena, and it is therefore of great importance to assess the long-term risk they pose to society. Among the greatest threats are those associated with high winds and related phenomena, such as storm surges. Here we assess the probability that hurricane winds will affect any given point in space by combining an estimate of the probability that a hurricane will pass within some given radius of the point in question with an estimate of the spatial probability density of storm winds. To assess the probability that storms will pass close enough to a point of interest to affect it, we apply two largely independent techniques for generating large numbers of synthetic hurricane tracks. The first treats each track as a Markov chain, using statistics derived from observed hurricane-track data. The second technique begins by generating a large class of synthetic, time-varying wind fields at 850 and 250 hPa whose variance, covariance, and monthly means match NCEP–NCAR reanalysis d...

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