The 21st century decline in damaging European windstorms

Abstract

A decline in damaging European windstorms has led to a reduction in insured losses in the 21st century. This decline is explored by identifying a damaging windstorm characteristic and investigating how and why this characteristic has changed in recent years. This novel exploration is based on 6103 high-resolution model-generated historical footprints (1979-2014), representing the whole European domain. The footprint of a windstorm is defined as the maximum wind gust speed to occur at a set of spatial locations over the duration of the storm. The area of the footprint exceeding 20-1 over land,A/20, is shown to be a good predictor of windstorm damage. This damaging characteristic has decreased in the 21st century, due to a statistically significant decrease in the relative frequency of windstorms exceeding 20-1 in north-western Europe, although an increase is observed in southern Europe. This is explained by a decrease in the quantiles of the footprint wind gust speed distribution above approximately 18-1 at locations in this region. In addition, an increased variability in the number of windstorm events is observed in the 21st century. Much of the change in A/20 is explained by the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO). The correlation between winter total A/20 and winter-averaged mean sea-level pressure resembles the NAO pattern, shifted eastwards over Europe, and a strong positive relationship (correlation of 0.715) exists between winter total A/20 and winter-averaged NAO. The shifted correlation pattern, however, suggests that other modes of variability may also play a role in the variation in windstorm losses.