This study looked at estimating damages caused by hurricanes in the United States. It assessed the relationship between the maximum wind speed at landfall and the resulting damage caused. The study found that the complex processes that determine the size of the damages inflicted could be estimated using this simple relationship. This work could be used to examine how often extreme damage events are likely to occur and the impact of stronger hurricane winds on the US Atlantic and Gulf coasts.

Verifying high-resolution weather forecasts has become increasingly complicated, and simple, easy-to-understand summary measures are a good alternative. Recent work has demonstrated some common pitfalls with many such summaries. Here, new summary measures are introduced that do not suffer from these drawbacks, while still providing meaningful information.

Consistent definition and verification of extreme events are still lacking. We propose a new generalized spatio-temporal threshold clustering method to identify extreme event episodes. We observe changes in the distribution of extreme precipitation frequency from large-scale well-connected spatial patterns to smaller-scale, more isolated rainfall clusters, possibly leading to more localized droughts and heat waves.