Variation of climate change impact on hurricane losses across US coast

Hurricanes are one of the most disastrous natural hazard impacting the US coastal regions causing a huge damage to property every year. Since hurricane develops in warmer regions of the ocean, hurricane risk varies across the different locations throughout the coast depending on their proximity to the ocean as well as the ocean temperature. This is reflected in terms of the regional variation of hurricane losses. Further, future climatic conditions are expected to be different compared to present with an overall increase in the sea surface temperature. This increase is found to be non-uniform spatially based on the projections provided by Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC 2013). This leads to varying level of increase in hurricane risks across the different locations. As such, some low-risk zones will be at a much higher risk whereas other regions observe only slight increase of risk in future. Thus, this study investigates the changes in the hurricane hazard and losses for residential buildings across the US south and east coast under the climate change scenarios.