Citation

Bonazzi A, Dobbin AL, Turner JK, Wilson PS, Mitas C, Bellone E. Weather Clim. Soc. 2014; 6(1): 77-90.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2014, American Meteorological Society)

DOI

10.1175/WCAS-D-13-00025.1

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

We develop a stochastic North Atlantic hurricane track model whose climate inputs are Atlantic main development region (MDR) and Indo-Pacific (IP) sea surface temperatures and produce extremely long model simulations for 58 different climates, each one conditioned on 5 yr of observed SSTs from 1950 to 2011--hereafter referred as medium-term (MT) views.Stringent tests are then performed to prove that MT simulations are better predictors of hurricane landfalls than a long-term view conditioned on the entire SST time series from 1950 to 2011.In this analysis, the authors extrapolate beyond the historical record, but not in terms of a forecast of future conditions. Rather it is attempted to define--within the limitation of the modeling approach--the magnitude of extreme events that could have materialized in the past at fixed probability thresholds and what is the likelihood of observed landfalls given such estimates.Finally, a loss proxy is built and the value of the analysis results from a simplified property and casualty insurance perspective is shown. Medium-term simulations of hurricane activity are used to set the strategy of reinsurance coverage purchased by a hypothetical primary insurance, leading to improved solvency margins.