Comment on gmd-2021-384

Abstract

Tropical cyclones are responsible for a large share of global damage resulting from natural disasters and estimating cyclone-related damage at a national level is a challenge attracting growing interest in the context of climate change. The global climate models, whose outputs are available from the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP), do not resolve tropical cyclones. The Cyclone generation Algorithm including a THERmodynamic module for Integrated National damage Assessment (CATHERINA) presented in this paper, couples statistical and thermodynamic relationships to generate synthetic tracks sensitive to local climate conditions and estimates the damage induced by tropical cyclones at a national level. The framework is designed to be compatible with CMIP models’ data offering a simple solution to resolve tropical cyclones in climate projections. We illustrate it by producing damage projections in Representative Concentration Pathways (RCP) at the global level and for individual countries. The algorithm contains a module to correct biases in climate models based on the distributions of the climate variables in the reanalyses.