How are Atlantic basin-wide hurricane activity and economic losses related?

Abstract

The authors investigate the statistical relationships between interannual variations in economic losses from Tropical Cyclones (TCs), basin-wide metrics of TC activity, and indicators of large-scale climate variability in the North Atlantic basin. The results show substantial and statistically significant correlations between the economic losses and some seasonal TC activity metrics, namely the accumulated cyclone energy and power dissipation index. These results suggest that accurate seasonal forecasts of these metrics can be taken as relevant to potential TC losses, even though the metrics in question do not take into account whether storms make landfall, let alone where they do so. The authors suggest that the degree of correlation obtained might be considered a baseline against which to measure some aspects of the performance of catastrophe models.