Description
Tropical cyclones (such as hurricanes) unleash devastating economic impacts, primarily through the destruction of infrastructure, homes, and businesses, necessitating billions in recovery and reconstruction costs. They disrupt industries, particularly agriculture, manufacturing, and tourism, leading to significant revenue losses and job disruptions. This product represents historical hurricane risk globally, based on observed/confirmed records of tropical cyclones. This dataset is based on measuring the frequency of tropical cyclones at global land locations using the best available hurricane tracks from the NOAA National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI). A subset from tropical cyclones from 1980-present are used since they correspond to the highest quality observations. Wind speed information is used for the included storms, allowing for distinction between tropical depressions, tropical storms and hurricanes.
Technical Description
The SpatiaFi Historical Hurricane Risk dataset is a raster dataset that captures the near-historical risk from hurricanes across the globe, based on observed/confirmed records of tropical cyclones. This dataset is based on measuring the frequency of tropical cyclones at global land locations using the best available hurricane tracks from the NOAA National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI). A subset from tropical cyclones from 1980-2023 are used since they correspond to the highest quality observations. Wind speed information is used for the included storms, allowing for distinction between tropical depressions, tropical storms and hurricanes.
This hurricane static layer captures the historical risk to hurricanes (with wind speeds greater than 74 mph) for all land locations globally. These risk maps reflect historically-aggregated risk to hurricanes over the period January 1, 1980 to July 21, 2023.
This dataset contains the following fields:
- hurricane_index: The hurricane risk index scaled between 0 and 100 based on the minimum and maximum values in the raw hurricane frequency data. This hurricane index captures the historical risk to hurricanes (with wind speeds greater than 74 mph) for all land locations globally. These risk maps reflect historically-aggregated risk to hurricanes over the period 1980 to the present day.
- hurricane_risk_class: The hurricane risk classification for each value. Values are integers from 1 to 5 representing the following classes: Very Low Risk (1), Low Risk (2), Moderate Risk (3), High Risk (4), and Very High Risk (5). Values are categorized using the 44th, 67th, 84th, and 94th percentiles of the hurricane_index field, exclusive of '0' values.