A new view on the risk of typhoon occurrence in the western North Pacific

Kelvin S. Ng*, Gregor C. Leckebusch

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

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Abstract

To study high-impact tropical cyclones (TCs) is of crucial importance due to their extraordinary destructive potential that leads to major losses in many coastal areas in the western North Pacific (WNP). Nevertheless, because of the rarity of high-impact TCs, it is difficult to construct a robust hazard assessment based on the historical best track records. This paper aims to address this issue by introducing a computationally simple and efficient approach to build a physically consistent high-impact TC event set with non-realised TC events in the THORPEX Interactive Grand Global Ensemble (TIGGE) archive. This event set contains more than 10 000 years of TC events. The temporal and spatial characteristics of the new event set are consistent with the historical TC climatology in the WNP. It is shown that this TC event set contains ∼100 and ∼77 times more very severe typhoons and violent typhoons than the historical records, respectively. Furthermore, this approach can be used to improve the return-period estimation of TC-associated extreme wind. Consequently, a robust extreme TC hazard assessment, reflective of the current long-term climate variability phase, can be achieved using this approach.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)663-682
Number of pages20
JournalNatural Hazards and Earth System Sciences
Volume21
Issue number2
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 16 Feb 2021

Bibliographical note

Funding Information:
Acknowledgements. The authors thank three reviewers for their helpful and constructive comments. The authors thank Daniel Be-fort and Michael Angus for valuable discussions. This work was supported by the Building Resilience to Natural Disasters using Financial Instruments grant INPAIS (Integrated Threshold Development for Parametric Insurance Solutions for Guangdong Province China; grant ref: NE/R014264/1) through the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC). The computations described in this paper were performed using the BlueBEAR HPC service at the University of Birmingham.

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • General Earth and Planetary Sciences

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