Excerpt:
A significant influence on the rising storm damage trend has little to do with the weather.
It will cost Houston billions of dollars to recover from deadly storms that whipped hurricane-force winds through downtown buildings last week, experts estimate. But it no longer takes such an exceptional storm to destroy so much: The number of billion-dollar thunderstorms in the United States is rising dramatically, data show.
Decades ago, hurricanes, floods and winter storms more frequently landed on an annual National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration list of billion-dollar weather disasters. But now, thunderstorms — some of them spawning tornadoes — are driving a surge in weather-related property damage and insurance payouts across the United States.
That is in part because the ingredients needed to produce intense, damaging storms — including energy, instability and moisture in the atmosphere — are becoming more abundant as the planet warms, meteorologists said. Such conditions are in place more often as human emissions of greenhouse gases trap heat around the planet like a blanket.
But a more significant influence on the rising storm damage trend has little to do with the weather: Growth and development patterns mean there are many more homes and businesses in the way of tornadoes, hail and damaging winds than there were decades ago.
In the case of the Houston storm, any event sending 100-mph winds through a dense downtown would cause major destruction. But given how quickly the Houston region has grown in recent decades, sprawling into the Texas prairie, the event could still have caused billions of dollars in damage had it not tracked through the city center, said Steve Bowen, chief science officer for reinsurance broker Gallagher Re.
“There’s just that many more structures that potentially are going to be impacted,” Bowen said…
Explore additional Climate Data at the NOAA National Center for Environmental Information (NCEI):
