Development of an Extremes Vulnerability Index for the Lower 48 United States Based on NCEI's Climate Extremes Index and CDC's Social Vulnerability Index

The occurrence of extreme weather and climate events has increased in recent decades. This increasing frequency has adversely impacted economic and health outcomes, leading to an increasingly urgent need to study climate extremes. The National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI) created the Climate Extremes Index (CEI) in 1996 to quantify climate extremes. This presentation discusses how the CEI can be improved by recalculating it using Z-scores instead of the prior approach of using 10th and 90th percentiles. This provides a more accurate method of quantifying climate extremes while calculating the CEI at a climate division level. The CEI can also be applied to climate extremes vulnerability, by combining new CEI values with recalculated values of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's (CDC) Social Vulnerability Index (SVI). The result of this combination is a new Extremes Vulnerability Index (EVI) that calculates climate extremes vulnerability in the United States. The information contained in the EVI can be used by policymakers to implement policies and changes in infrastructure that mitigate risk in vulnerable climate divisions.