1,2,3,4,3,4,3,4,5,6,10,7,8,10,2,12,13,8,10,14,1- 1Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Department of Water and Climate, Etterbeek, Belgium (ni.li@vub.be)
- 2Department of Hydro Sciences, TUD Dresden University of Technology, Dresden, Germany
- 3Institute for Environmental Decisions, ETH Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland
- 4Federal Office of Meteorology and Climatology MeteoSwiss, Zurich, Switzerland
- 5Institute for Atmospheric and Climate Science, Department of Environmental Systems Science, ETH Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland
- 6RISE Research Institutes of Sweden, Sweden
- 7Department of Urban and Environmental Sociology, Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research — UFZ, Leipzig, Germany
- 8Department of Earth Sciences, Uppsala University, Uppsala, Sweden
- 9Laboratoire de Météorologie Dynamique - LMD-IPSL, Geosciences, Paris, France
- 10Swedish Centre for Impacts of Climate Extremes (climes), Uppsala University, Uppsala, Sweden
- 11Department of Linguistics and Philology, Uppsala University, Uppsala, Sweden
- 12Department of Compound Environmental Risks, Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research — UFZ, Leipzig, Germany
- 13Center for Scalable Data Analytics and Artificial Intelligence (ScaDS.AI), Dresden/Leipzig, Germany
- 14Department of Meteorology, Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden
Tropical cyclones pose serious threats to human society and ecosystems. Freely available tropical cyclone are typically calibrated using country-level impacts from EM-DAT, which limits their applications for local-scale risk assessment.
Here we present a new, sub-national set of tropical cyclone damage functions based on an unprecedented tropical cyclone damage dataset. First, we develop Wikimpacts 2.0, an expanded version of the publicly available Wikimpacts 1.0 database. The updated database incorporates non-English Wikipedia articles, multi-event articles, and tables and lists from English Wikipedia. After removing duplicates, Wikimpacts 2.0 contains 7,538 events for seven hazard types (Extratropical Storm/Cyclone, Tropical Storm/Cyclone, Extreme Temperature, Wildfire, Flood, Tornado and Drought) , compared with 2,928 in Wikimpacts 1.0. For tropical cyclones, our new dataset represents the largest collection of publicly available damage information.
Second, we re-calibrate tropical cyclone damage functions from Eberenz et al 2021 using 1,114 events with sub-national impact data over 2000–2024 from Wikimpacts 2.0. For damage-function calibration, we first match Wikimpacts events to IBTrACS records, yielding 1,114 matched events out of 1,869 IBTrACS tropical cyclones with landfall. We then compute annual exposure layers for 2000–2024 using the LitPop module in CLIMADA, generating one exposure layer per year for the calibration process. We calibrate damage functions at two spatial scales. At the national level, we use country-level impacts; for each country affected by an event, we compute a damage function. At the sub-national level, we aggregate impacts to administrative level 1 units (states/provinces) and compute a damage function for each unit. Thus, each event yields a set of damage functions across affected regions. These functions will enable improved local-scale risk assessments.
How to cite: Li, N., M. Kropf, C., Riedel, L., N. Bresch, D., Quilcaille, Y., Zahra, S., Madruga de Brito, M., Worou, K., Jezequel, A., Kurfali, M., Nivre, J., Zscheischler, J., Messori, G., and Thiery, W.: A new set of tropical cyclone damage functions calibrated with the Wikimpacts 2.0 database and CLIMADA ensemble-of-strategies method, EGU General Assembly 2026, Vienna, Austria, 3–8 May 2026, EGU26-11328, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu26-11328, 2026.
