Hurricane wind hazard assessment for a rapidly warming climate scenario

Although there is still much debate as to the causes, it is generally accepted in the scientific community that the climate is changing. The IPCC (2007) Fourth Assessment Report states that warming of the climate system is unequivocal, and that this warming has likely influenced observed changes in many physical systems at the global scale. In order to meet target safety and performances levels when designing structures and infrastructure systems in the future, it is essential that current design codes and standards adapt to reflect global climate change. With the trend toward performance-based engineering, for US coastal regions, along the Atlantic Ocean and Gulf of Mexico, this means a quantitative assessment of climate change impact on hurricane hazard performance levels is needed.This study couples a projected climate change scenario with state-of-the-art probabilistic event-based simulation procedures to assess the hurricane wind hazard under a worst-case climate change scenario. The hurricane wind hazard is defined herein using the hurricane intensity (maximum wind speed) and hurricane size (radius to maximum wind speed). Through Monte Carlo simulation, 10,000 years of hurricane events, under the current (2012) and future (2100) climate conditions, were generated. The hurricane intensity distribution and the joint distribution of hurricane intensity and size, under current and future climate scenarios, were then compared.