Extratropical cyclones cause vast amounts of damage across Europe throughout the winter seasons. The damage from these cyclones mainly comes from the associated severe winds. The most intense cyclones have gusts of over 200 kilometres per hour, resulting in substantial damage to property and forestry, for example, the Great Storm of 1987 uprooted approximately 15 million trees in one night. The average loss from these storms is over $2 billion per year (Schwierz et al. 2010) and is second only to Atlantic Hurricanes globally in terms of insured losses from natural hazards. However, the most severe cyclones such as Lothar (26/12/1999) and Kyrill (18/1/2007) can cause losses in excess of $10 billion (Munich Re, 2016). One property of extratropical cyclones is that they have a tendency to cluster (to arrive in groups – see example in Figure 1), and in such cases these impacts can be greatly increased. For example Windstorm Lothar was followed just one day later by Windstorm Martin and the two storms combined caused losses of over $15 billion. The large-scale atmospheric dynamics associated with clustering events have been discussed in a previous blog post and also in the scientific literature (Pinto et al., 2014; Priestley et al. 2017).
A large part of my PhD has involved investigating exactly how important the clustering of cyclones is on losses across Europe during the winter. In order to do this, I have used 918 years of high resolution coupled climate model data from HiGEM (Shaffrey et al., 2017) which provides a huge amount of winter seasons and cyclone events for analysis.
In order to understand how clustering affects losses, I first of all need to know how much loss/damage is associated with each individual cyclone. This is done using a measure called the Storm Severity Index (SSI – Leckebusch et al., 2008), which is a proxy for losses that is based on the 10-metre wind field of the cyclone events. The SSI is a good proxy for windstorm loss. Firstly, it scales the wind speed in any particular location by the 98th percentile of the wind speed climatology in that location. This scaling ensures that only the most severe winds at any one point are considered, as different locations have different perspectives on what would be classed as ‘damaging’. This exceedance above the 98th percentile is then raised to the power of 3 due to damage from wind being a highly non-linear function. Finally, we apply a population density weighting to our calculations. This weighting is required because a hypothetical gust of 40 m/s across London will cause considerably more damage than the same gust across far northern Scandinavia, and the population density is a good approximation for the density of insured property. An example of the SSI that has been calculated for Windstorm Lothar is shown in Figure 2.
From Figure 2b you can see how most of the damage from Windstorm Lothar was concentrated across central/northern France and also across southern Germany. This is because the winds here were most extreme relative to what is the climatology. Even though the winds are highest across the North Atlantic Ocean, the lack of insured property, and a much high climatological winter mean wind speed, means that we do not observe losses/damage from Windstorm Lothar in these locations.
I can apply the SSI to all of the individual cyclone events in HiGEM and therefore can construct a climatology of where windstorm losses occur. Figure 3 shows the average loss across all 918 years of HiGEM. You can see that the losses are concentrated in a band from southern UK towards Poland in an easterly direction. This mainly covers the countries of Great Britain, Belgium, The Netherlands, France, Germany, and Denmark.
This blog post introduces my methodology of calculating and investigating the losses associated with the winter season extratropical cyclones. Work in Priestley et al. (2018) uses this methodology to investigate the role of clustering on winter windstorm losses.
This work has been funded by the SCENARIO NERC DTP and also co-sponsored by Aon Benfield.
Email: m.d.k.priestley@pgr.reading.ac.uk
References
Leckebusch, G. C., Renggli, D., and Ulbrich, U. 2008. Development and application of an objective storm severity measure for the Northeast Atlantic region. Meteorologische Zeitschrift. https://doi.org/10.1127/0941-2948/2008/0323.
Munich Re. 2016. Loss events in Europe 1980 – 2015. 10 costliest winter storms ordered by overall losses. https://www.munichre.com/touch/naturalhazards/en/natcatservice/significant-natural-catastrophes/index.html
Pinto, J. G., Gómara, I., Masato, G., Dacre, H. F., Woollings, T., and Caballero, R. 2014. Large-scale dynamics associated with clustering of extratropical cyclones affecting Western Europe. Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres. https://doi.org/10.1002/2014JD022305.
Priestley, M. D. K., Dacre, H. F., Shaffrey, L. C., Hodges, K. I., and Pinto, J. G. 2018. The role of European windstorm clustering for extreme seasonal losses as determined from a high resolution climate model, Nat. Hazards Earth Syst. Sci. Discuss., https://doi.org/10.5194/nhess-2018-165, in review.
Priestley, M. D. K., Pinto, J. G., Dacre, H. F., and Shaffrey, L. C. 2017. Rossby wave breaking, the upper level jet, and serial clustering of extratropical cyclones in western Europe. Geophysical Research Letters. https://doi.org/10.1002/2016GL071277.
Schwierz, C., Köllner-Heck, P., Zenklusen Mutter, E. et al. 2010. Modelling European winter wind storm losses in current and future climate. Climatic Change. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10584-009-9712-1.
Shaffrey, L. C., Hodson, D., Robson, J., Stevens, D., Hawkins, E., Polo, I., Stevens, I., Sutton, R. T., Lister, G., Iwi, A., et al. 2017. Decadal predictions with the HiGEM high resolution global coupled climate model: description and basic evaluation, Climate Dynamics, https://doi.org/10.1007/s00382-016-3075-x.
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