Risk analysis for hurricanes accounting for the effects of climate change

Hurricanes are a complex hazard that involves several aspects (wind, rainfall, and storm surge). Past work typically considered one or two of these aspects in isolation. However, to accurately predict the associated damage and losses, it is important to include all three aspects. When looking at long-term analyses, climate change and changes in the built environment add further complexity. The choice and design of mitigation and adaptation strategies for the impact of hurricanes, both at the built or modified natural environment and at the community level, have to be based on complete and accurate risk analyses. Such risk analyses require a framework capable of incorporating all three aspects of the hazard and have to be based on models that fully account for the relevant uncertainties in the hazard as well as in the possible scenarios of climate change. This chapter presents a risk analysis framework for hurricanes. The presented framework has four steps: the modelling of the hurricane activity, the modelling of the hazard scenarios, the modelling of damage and losses, and the development of mitigation and adaptation strategies. Suitable models for the first and third steps can be already found in the literature, and this chapter focuses on the second step of the proposed framework and presents a probabilistic model for storm-surge predictions. Lastly, for the fourth step, the chapter shows the possible use of the information obtained by the proposed risk analysis in the development of mitigation and adaptation strategies.