Building and Validating Geographically Refined Hurricane Wind Risk Models for Residential Structures

Abstract

AbstractAccurate estimation of risk to residential structures from hurricane winds is critical for emergency planning and post-event recovery. Models based on fragility curves are widely used for assessing wind damage risk at the county and census tract levels. Large-scale evaluation of the predictive accuracy of these models has been hampered by the lack of detailed damage data. This paper has three aims: (1) to evaluate the predictive accuracy of fragility-curve-based models at the census tract level using a comprehensive damage data set for Harris County residences collected after Hurricane Ike in 2008, (2) to demonstrate the need for geographically refined models of wind damage risk at spatial scales of 1-km2 blocks and to analyze the performance of fragility-curve models at that level, and (3) to explore the sources of errors made by fragility-curve-based models at the census tract and 1-km2-block level using a statistical machine learning model constructed from 21 potential explanatory variables. Th...