Maximum wind speeds and US hurricane losses

[1] There is academic, commercial, and public interest in estimating loss from hurricanes striking land and understand-ing how loss might change as a result of future variations in climate. Here we show that the relationship between wind speed and loss is exponential and that loss increases with wind speed at a rate of 5 % per m s1. The relationship is derived using quantile regression and a data set comprising wind speeds of hurricanes hitting the United States and nor-malized economic losses. We suggest that the “centercepts” for the different quantiles account for exposure-related fac-tors such as population density, precipitation, and surface roughness, and that once these effects are accounted for, the increase in loss with wind speed is consistent across quantiles. An out-of-sample test of this relationship correctly predicts economic losses from Hurricane Irene in 2011. The exponential relationship suggests that increased wind speeds will produce significantly higher losses; however, increases in exposed property and population are expected to be a more important factor for near future losses. Citation: Murnane