Objective identification of potentially damaging tropical cyclones over the Western North Pacific

Abstract

An impact-oriented objective windstorm identification algorithm (WiTRACK), originally developed and well established for studies on extra-tropical storms, is further developed to identify damage and loss related Tropical Cyclones (TC) over the Western North Pacific. Results based on JRA-55 reanalysis data reveal that WiTRACK is able to detect the majority of strong events with hitrates of about 77%/90%/98% for TCs of the three most severe categories. Using economic loss data for China, it is found that especially events with large losses are associated with a windstorm event identified by WiTRACK. Past loss events successfully tracked by WiTRACK are associated with substantially higher losses than those events, not identified by WiTRACK. Thus, even though less skilful than traditional detection schemes if evaluated for the totality of TC events, WiTRACK is a powerful tool to identify severe, damage and loss-related TC events which additionally benefits from its simplicity and minimal input data demands. The latter may allow to apply WiTRACK to datasets not meeting the data requirements of more complex TC detection schemes.