A New Interpretation of Global Tropical Cyclone Landfall Risk

The IBTrACS tropical cyclone data set is used to derive a new historical catalogue of global tropical cyclone landfalls. The methodology used to construct this catalogue relies on defining a set of global “landfall gates”. These gates discretize coastlines across the globe, enabling historical landfall frequencies to be calculated at both local and country-level resolutions. This methodology also allows for the treatment of bypassing storms, which is particularly important when accurately assessing the tropical cyclone risk in smaller island states. Finally, we will discuss a refinement of the methodology which uses information on near-miss landfalls to calculate smoothed landfall frequencies on these gates. The availability of such local-level smoothed landfall distributions for all regions around the globe is useful in a wide range of risk assessment and disaster preparedness applications.