In our first blog post on weather volatility and climate change, we describe trends in extreme weather events in the United States from 1995 to 2022 and how different types of weather events (such as floods, hurricanes, heat waves, and wildfires) cause different levels of damage. The source of our data is the Storm Events Database from the National Weather Service, which is operated by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. In that blog post, we also describe our processing and aggregation of these data and our annual county-level data set of damage and deaths from extreme weather events. In this follow-up blog post, we analyze where the weather events tend to occur and dig deeper into the data to identify specific counties that have experienced significant impacts from extreme weather.
That the geographic distribution of impacts from extreme weather varies greatly will come as no surprise. A person living in Louisiana or Florida has a much greater probability of experiencing a hurricane than someone who lives in an inland state, or even in a state along other parts of the US coastline. Wildfires are more a fact of life for people in California than in, say, Nebraska. Tornadoes are more common for Midwesterners than for residents of other parts of the country. In this blog post, we explore these patterns in more detail.
Figure 1 shows total property damage caused by extreme weather events over the 28-year period from 1995 through 2022 for each county in the United States (2022$ adjusted for inflation). The lighter the color, the smaller the economic damage. Many counties in the United States experienced relatively little damage from storm events over the period 1995 to 2022. The relatively small amount of damage doesn’t mean that these counties don’t experience storms, but rather that the damage was smaller there than in other locations. Counties in black and purple experienced the greatest damage, and these counties are concentrated along the Gulf Coast; primarily in Florida, Louisiana, and Texas. Other counties that experienced high amounts of damage are in Arizona, Colorado, New Jersey, New York, and Southern California, and here and there throughout the United States.
