Impact of uncertainty induced by fatality function on future tropical cyclone risk assessment.

Tropical cyclones (TCs) are among the deadliest extreme events occurring under a warming climate. Future TC risk assessment depend on TC projection from climate models and impact function relating TC to its possible consequence. Few studies have explored the uncertainty of impact function in future TC risk assessment compared to uncertainty in future TC characteristics. In this study, we investigate the uncertainty in TC fatality risk assessment induced by geographic and TC category-dependence of fatality function. We focus on all provinces in the mainland of China with historically recorded TC-induced fatalities and examine their TC fatality risks by assessing the difference in the annual average fatalities between current and future climate conditions. Synthetic TCs derived from four climate models and fatality functions parameterized from three grouped historical TC disaster datasets are used to observe the uncertainty induced by climate model and fatality function. Results show that the changes in the TC frequency, wind, TC-induced rainfall intensity, and exposure due to climate change in each province are dependent on the climate models. And the changes in the annual average fatality of each province are dependent on both the climate models and fatality functions. Climate models play a dominant role in determining the spatial pattern of future risk, while the fatality functions can alter the direction and magnitude of the risk change for certain provinces. Our results highlight the role of fatality function in detecting future TC risk under climate change, and inspire further TC impact studies that consider the heterogeneity of both climate conditions and geographical locations.

Vulnerability to typhoons: A comparison of consequence and driving factors between Typhoon Hato (2017) and Typhoon Mangkhut (2018).

Typhoon disasters have caused casualties, property loss, and other negative impacts to social and economic development. Vulnerability is an important component of typhoon risk. However, little is known about the contributions of vulnerability factors and their interaction effects on typhoon-induced losses at a fine scale. Focusing on the vulnerability measures of Typhoon Hato in 2017 and Typhoon Mangkhut in 2018, this study aims to quantify the contribution and interactive effects of physical and socioeconomic factors on vulnerability based on the GeoDetector method and determine the factors that account for most of the change in vulnerability. The results show that from Typhoon Hato in 2017 to Typhoon Mangkhut in 2018, the vulnerability of the economy and houses decrease on average. Rain intensity and wind intensity are the dominant factors of disaster loss for Typhoon Hato and Typhoon Mangkhut, respectively. Vegetation cover and landform explain vulnerability better than average slope in most instances. For different loss types, the dominant socioeconomic vulnerability factor is different. For both typhoons, emergency transfer has a higher determining power (q) ranking for the population vulnerability, while the percentage of the GDP made up of primary industry have higher q ranking for economic vulnerability. The dominant interaction effects between two vulnerability factors differ depending on the typhoon and loss type but show a nonlinear enhancement effect in most cases. Moreover, changes in the maximum 4-hour accumulated rainfall account for most of the change in vulnerability between Hato and Mangkhut. Overall, the results can be conducive to understanding the complexity of vulnerability to typhoons and provide a reference for possible indicators for vulnerability assessment models, and determining the reasons for changes in vulnerability can be constructive to the formulation of specific policies for disaster prevention and mitigation.

Emerging Trends and New Developments in Disaster Research after the 2008 Wenchuan Earthquake.

On the tenth anniversary of the 2008 Wenchuan Earthquake, investigating the evolution of disaster science is worthwhile and can be used to improve the future execution of disaster risk management. Based on more than 55,786 articles on the relative topic of "Disaster" derived from the Web of Science Core Collection from 1999⁻2017, this study employs CiteSpace and Google Earth to identify and visualize the spatial distribution of publications, bursts of keywords and categories, highly cited references, and interdisciplinary levels and then identify the emerging trends of disaster research over the past 20 years. The results show that the earthquake indeed jumpstarted a massive wave of disaster research around the world and increased international cooperation over the last decade. However, in terms of both the quantity and quality of publications in disaster research fields, China is lagging behind the U.S. and European countries. Moreover, although designing disaster prevention and mitigation strategies is a new popular field of disaster science, geological environment changes and geologic hazards triggered by earthquakes are more popular research topics than disaster emergency and recovery. In addition, the transdisciplinary level of disaster science increased after the earthquake. This interdisciplinary characteristic of disaster science gradually increased in popularity, which demonstrates that people can learn from catastrophes. These emerging trends could serve as a scientific basis to clearly understand disaster science progress over the last 20 years and provide a reference for rapidly identifying frontier issues in disaster science.