I will quit babbling about the Great Miami Hurricane, at least for a while.
Some methodology from the Pielke et al paper "Normalized Hurricane Damage in the United States:
1900–2005" that we linked to on Saturday:
This paper normalizes mainland U.S. hurricane damage from 1900–2005 to 2005 values using two methodologies. A normalization provides an estimate of the damage that would occur if storms from the past made landfall under another year’s societal conditions. Our methods use changes in inflation and wealth at the national level and changes in population and housing units at the coastal county level. Across both normalization methods, there is no remaining trend of increasing absolute damage in the data set, which follows the lack of trends in landfall frequency or intensity observed over the twentieth century.
The 1970s and 1980s were notable because of the extremely low amounts of damage compared to other decades. The decade 1996–2005 has the second most damage among the past 11 decades, with only the decade 1926–1935 surpassing its costs....MORE
From Roger Pielke Jr's blog:
...Here is a table showing the top 20 hurricane losses 1900 to 2011, normalized to 2012 dollars. In other words, the figures show an estimate of what the losses would be were historical storms to occur in 2012. The numbers come from ICAT based on an extension of Pielke et al. 2008.
STORM NAME LANDFALL DATE DAMAGE RANK DAMAGE ($ 2012) Great Miami Sep 18,1926 1 180,220,000,000 Galveston Sep 08,1900 2 105,570,000,000 Galveston Aug 17,1915 3 84,910,000,000 Katrina Aug 29,2005 4 84,620,000,000 Andrew Aug 24,1992 5 64,410,000,000 Storm 11 in 1944 Oct 19,1944 6 53,940,000,000 Donna Sep 10,1960 7 49,810,000,000 New England Sep 21,1938 8 46,840,000,000 Lake Okeechobee Sep 16,1928 9 44,890,000,000 Wilma Oct 24,2005 10 25,960,000,000 Hazel Oct 18,1954 11 24,260,000,000 Diane Aug 19,1955 12 24,110,000,000 Camille Aug 17,1969 13 23,040,000,000 Charley Aug 13,2004 14 20,380,000,000 Ike Sep 13,2008 15 20,370,000,000 Hugo Sep 21,1989 16 20,020,000,000 Carol Aug 31,1954 17 19,290,000,000 Agnes Jun 22,1972 18 19,010,000,000 Ivan Sep 16,2004 19 18,590,000,000 Storm 2 in 1949 Aug 26,1949 20 18,510,000,000
While it will be some time until we have apples to apples estimates from Sandy, the current estimates of $20 billion would place Sandy at #17 all time out of 242 loss-producng storms 1900 to present (in the top 10%). If the damage gets to $30 billion it would crack the top 10 and (top 5%). Right now it seems unlikely that Sandy will climb any higher on the table. (Note that inland flood damage is not included in the tabulations above.)...MORE
