Hurricane vulnerability modeling: Development and future trends

Catastrophe models help to evaluate the vulnerability of the building stock exposed to a hazard. This paper presents a history of the hurricane risk models in Florida, and discusses their relationship to the building codes. The first models were econometric, and failed to predict the insured building losses produced by hurricane Andrew. This led to a change in the loss projection paradigm and to the advent of modern catastrophe modeling. Advantages and challenges of the current methodologies are discussed, including the quality of input, validation, uncertainty, and scope of the outputs. The paper concludes with a brief overview of current and future research in vulnerability modeling.

► We examine the development of hurricane vulnerability modeling and building codes.
► We evaluate econometric methods' failure to predict hurricane Andrew losses.
► We survey vulnerability models in literature.
► Strengths, weaknesses and uncertainty sources of vulnerability models are discussed.
► Future trends and challenges in vulnerability modeling are surveyed.