Typhoon Vulnerability Analysis in South Korea Utilizing Damage Record of Typhoon Maemi

Abstract

The purpose of this research is to identify the indicators of typhoon damage and develop a metric for typhoon vulnerability functions employing the losses associated with Typhoon Maemi. Typhoons cause significant financial damages worldwide every year. Federal and local governments, insurance companies, and construction companies strive to develop typhoon risk assessment models and use them to quantify the risks so that they can avoid, mitigate, or transfer the financial risks. Therefore, typhoon risk assessment modeling is becoming increasingly important, and in order to achieve a sophisticated evaluation, it is also important to reflect more specified and local vulnerabilities. Although several previous studies on economic loss associated with natural catastrophe have identified essential risk indicators, there has been a shortage of more specific research studies focusing on the correlation between vulnerability and economic loss caused by typhoons. In order to fill this gap, this study collected and analyzed the actual loss record of Typhoon Maemi collected and accumulated by a major insurance company in Korea. In order to create the vulnerability functions and to identify the natural hazard indicators and basic building information indicators, information from the insurance record was used in the analysis. The results and metric of this research provide a pragmatic approach that helps create vulnerability functions for abovementioned sectors and like estimating local vulnerabilities and predicting and coping with the possible damage and loss from typhoons.