Searcharxiv⌕ Search
Home/Archive/arXiv

arXiv · 2510.20074

Projecting Hurricane Risk in Atlantic Canada under Climate Change

Saeed Saviz Naeini·Reda Snaiki·Alejandro Di Luca
View original source ↗Read source document ↗Export metadata ↓

Abstract

Atlantic Canada faces significant hurricane threats from damaging winds and coastal flooding that are projected to intensify under climate change. This study adopts a two-stage framework. First, the evolution of wind and coastal-flood hazards is quantified from a historical baseline (1979-2014) to two future periods: a near future (2024-2059) and a far future (2060-2095). Hazard fields are constructed from large ensembles of physics-informed synthetic hurricane tracks, and changes are evaluated in return-period wind speeds and in inundation depth and extent, with sea-level rise included for flood projections. The second stage estimates hurricane risk using wind as an operational proxy for total loss, combining the simulated wind fields with exposure data and a vulnerability relationship to compute expected damages. This design clarifies how physical drivers change and how those shifts translate into loss potential without requiring fully coupled compound-loss modeling. Results indicate an intensification of wind extremes and a substantial amplification of coastal inundation, yielding higher wind-proxy risk for many coastal communities. Spatial patterns show a heterogeneous escalation of risk concentrated along exposed shorelines and urban corridors. This comprehensive analysis of both hazard evolution and proxy risk provides decision-ready evidence on where and by how much hurricane losses are likely to grow. The approach clarifies the link between physical drivers and loss potential, ensuring compatibility with standard wind-centric workflows used in engineering and insurance practice.

Explore related subjects

physics.ao-ph

Keep this discovery

Explore connections, maps & timelines

BibTeXRIS

Saeed Saviz Naeini, Reda Snaiki, Alejandro Di Luca. 2025-10-22. Projecting Hurricane Risk in Atlantic Canada under Climate Change. https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.20074

Cite the original work for its findings. Save a collection to share your selection of sources.

KEEP EXPLORING

Related papers

arXiv2026

Windowed Envelope Statistics for Time-Domain Significant Wave Height Estimation From HF Radar

Significant wave height (SWH) retrieval from high-frequency (HF) radar typically relies on a weak second-order Doppler continuum that is sensitive to noise, interference, and spectral leakage. This letter presents a Windowed Envelope Statistics Estimator (WESE) that operates directly on beam-formed time-domain voltages. A second-order term obtained from a Neumann expansion of the rough-surface field equation motivates quadratic compensation of localized radar features. WESE extracts the mean, standard deviation, or variance from overlapping windows of the in-phase, quadrature, or envelope-magnitude sequence, followed by quadratic compensation, rank ordering, least-squares regression, and causal smoothing. Evaluation used 335 synchronized hourly observations from a 13.385 MHz, 12-element WERA system at Argentia, Newfoundland and Labrador. The optimal configuration used quadrature variance, a 16-sample window, 896 retained chronological samples, and 30-h smoothing, achieving an RMSE of 0.152 m and a Pearson correlation of 0.978. This represents RMSE reductions of 32.1% and 18.7% relative to previously reported linear and second-order compensated ordered-statistics models, respectively. The results demonstrate robust time-domain SWH estimation without explicit Doppler-spectrum construction.

physics.ao-ph↗
arXiv2026

KiloDA: Reconstructing kilometer-scale near-surface wind states from sparse station observations

Accurate kilometer-scale near-surface winds are important for understanding atmospheric processes over complex terrain, yet remain difficult to reconstruct from sparse and unevenly distributed observations. Here we introduce KiloDA, a diffusion framework for hourly kilometer-scale wind reconstruction from surface stations. KiloDA learns the statistical distribution and spatial structure of wind fields from historical 3-km Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model forecasts. At each reconstruction time, no contemporaneous WRF field is used. Instead, station observations provide the only constraints on the current atmospheric state and guide posterior sampling from the learned prior. In idealized WRF experiments, KiloDA recovers localized wind structures when only 0.24% of grid cells are observed and shows an overall advantage over conventional interpolation across terrain conditions and wind speed regimes. This capability largely transfers to real observations. In a fully withheld region, KiloDA reduces the median wind speed root mean square error (RMSE) by 19% relative to ERA5 reanalysis, using only observations outside the region, with the largest improvements over high-elevation and high-relief terrain. A random station holdout further confirms that this advantage extends across different complex-terrain locations and holdout configurations. These results show that historical model archives can provide useful structural knowledge for reconstructing kilometer-scale wind fields from sparse observations without requiring an accurate model estimate of the current atmospheric state.

physics.ao-ph↗