The Impact of El Niño-Southern Oscillation on Tropical Cyclone Risks

The El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) is the most important inter-annual signal of climate variability on the planet. It affects many natural hazards including tropical cyclones (TCs), known for causing severe economic losses and many fatalities. Although research efforts have examined ENSO’s influence on TC characteristics including frequency and intensity in different basins, the transfer of these findings to global TC risk assessments has yet to be undertaken. This covers aspects such as damage to physical assets and the number of people affected. However, this is complicated by many uncertainties, such as landfall location (heterogeneous distribution of exposures) and vulnerability definitions. To bridge this gap, we assess TC risks on physical assets and affected people under ENSO’s influence and quantify related sources of uncertainty on a global scale.

We analyze TC risks during El Niño and La Niña years, using three types of TC datasets: the International Best Track Archive for Climate Stewardship (IBTrACS), probabilistic tracks generated by a random walk algorithm (IBTrACS_p), and synthetic TCs generated by a statistical-dynamical TC model (MIT). Furthermore, we quantify the sensitivity of input variables, such as the ENSO threshold, and assess uncertainties arising from TC landfall location using uniform exposure values. The outcomes regarding ENSO-conditioned TC risks can potentially improve seasonal TC risk prediction, thus benefiting policymakers and the insurance industry alike. Additionally, the results contribute to more balanced and diversified (multi-)hazard risk portfolios by accounting for ENSO as an important common modulator of spatially compounding hazards.