CLIMADA v1: A global weather and climate risk assessment platform

Abstract

The need for assessing the risk of extreme weather events is ever increasing. In addition to quantification of risk today, the role of aggravating factors such as high population growth and changing climate conditions matters, too. We present the open-source software CLIMADA (CLIMate ADAptation), which integrates hazard, exposure, and vulnerability to compute the necessary metrics to assess risk and to quantify socio-economic impact. The software design is modular and object oriented, offering a simple collaborative framework and a parallelization strategy which allows for scalable computations on clusters. CLIMADA supports multi-hazard calculations and provides an event-based probabilistic approach that is globally consistent for a wide range of resolutions, suitable for whole-country to detailed local studies. This paper uses the platform to estimate and contextualize the damage of hurricane Irma in the Caribbean in 2017. Most of the affected islands are non-sovereign countries and also rely on overseas support in case disaster strikes. The risk assessment performed for this region, based on remotely available data available shortly before or hours after landfall of Irma, proves to be close to reported damage and hence demonstrates a method to provide readily available impact estimates and associated uncertainties in real time.