A global historical data set of tropical cyclone exposure

Tropical cyclones pose a major risk to societies worldwide, with about 22 million directly affected people and damages of $29 billion on average per year over the last 20 years. While data on observed cyclones tracks (location of the centre) and wind speeds are publicly available, these data sets do not contain information about the spatial extent of the storm and people or assets exposed. Based on available spatially explicit data on population densities and gross domestic product (GDP) we estimate (1) the number of people and (2) the sum of assets exposed to wind speeds above these thresholds accounting for temporal changes in historical distribution of population and assets (TCE-hist) and assuming fixed 2015 patterns (TCE-2015). The associated spatially explicit and aggregated country-event-level exposure data (TCE-DAT) cover the period 1950 to 2015 and are freely available at external pagehttps://doi.org/10.5194/essd-10-185-2018. This way, we are happy to provide key information to (1) assess the contribution of climatological versus socio-economic drivers of changes in exposure to tropical cyclones, (2) estimate changes in vulnerability from the difference in exposure and reported damages and calibrate associated damage functions, and (3) build improved exposure-based predictors to estimate higher-level societal impacts such as long-term effects on GDP, employment, or migration. We expect that the free availability of the underlying model and TCE-DAT will make research on tropical cyclone risks more accessible to non-experts and stakeholders.

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