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KLIMAFORSK-Stort program klima

Extreme windstorms and related damage

Alternative title: Ekstremvind og skade

Awarded: NOK 9.7 mill.

Project Number:

300608

Project Period:

2020 - 2024

Funding received from:

Location:

Extreme winds and related damages is a major factor in the Norwegian society's overall weather and climate vulnerability. Storm damage makes up over half the insurance payments and are by far the largest component of loss claims related to natural hazards. Planning for and mitigating windstorm impacts requires detailed knowledge of the historical severity, location and frequency of windstorms and their relation to observed damage. Furthermore, understanding how windstorms may change in the future is crucial in assessing future damage and risk. Through the use of daily damage data from the Norwegian Natural Perils Pool covering all the country's municipalities, population figures from Statistics Norway and a newly developed data set on extreme winds dating back to 1980, StormRisk has linked damage to wind through several so-called "damage functions" that describe the relationship between storm intensity and damage. New methods are now being worked on where machine learning algorithms are used, to see if it is possible to improve wind-damage relationships. StormRisk will also quantify possible changes in extreme winds due to climate change by analyzing a number of regional climate simulations and linking the results to changes in both return values for extreme winds and possible future damage. Currently, future extreme winds from 10 different climate simulations have been corrected for systematic errors. These will later in the project be used together with scenarios for population changes from Statistics Norway to calculate future changes in wind damage.

Losses related to extreme winds make up over half the insurance payments related to weather and climate extremes in Norway. Planning for and mitigating these impacts requires detailed knowledge of the extreme winds and their relation to damage. The project aims to increase understanding of how windstorms and damage is related and incorporate this knowledge in a useful way for impact and adaptation purposes through the development of detailed return values for extreme winds and storm-damage functions using four decades of nationwide insurance data on municipality level. The project will further quantify possible changes in extreme winds due to future climate change and their uncertainty by analyzing an ensemble of regional climate models and link the results to the developed storm-damage functions. Future changes in exposure will be addressed through national demographic scenarios and the benefit of reducing the vulnerability by assuming that building standards are strengthen to prevent losses for winds below a certain return period will be conducted. The project will have involvement from several user communities. The most important being the Norwegian Directorate for Civil Protection (DSB) which has the national responsibility to follow up local, regional and national preparedness and emergency planning. End-user results and data sets will be disseminated through the National Climate Service dissemination system and the underlying data will be made accessible through the national e-infrastructure for scientific data.

Publications from Cristin

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Funding scheme:

KLIMAFORSK-Stort program klima