Exploring Interbasin Correlations of Tropical Cyclones and Tropical Cyclone Losses

Tropical cyclones (TCs) are one of the most costly natural hazards on Earth, and there is a desire to mitigate this risk. It is securely established that TC activity relates to ENSO in all oceanic basins (e.g. N. Atlantic). However, when a recent multi-basin review of correlation coefficients to ENSO [Steptoe et al. 2017] was applied to a financial model of losses related to TCs, there appeared to be no significant inter-relationship between the losses between regions (e.g. US, China) [Lloyds', 2016]. It is therefore of interest to examine the chain of environmental and anthropogenic processes from TC genesis to financial loss to examine how correlations degrade. A number of hypotheses are statistically investigated, primarily using Spearman's coefficient and ranks to decouple dependency structures from the marginal distributions, but also Poisson regression.

Lloyd’s (2016), The risk of global weather connections: Are atmospheric hazards independent?, Emerging Risk Report, (Nov), 1–46

Steptoe, H., S. E. O. Jones, and H. Fox (2017), Correlations between extreme atmospheric hazards and global teleconnections: Implications for multi-hazard resilience, Reviews of Geophysics, 55, doi:10.1002/2017/RG000567.