Impact assessment of landfalling tropical cyclones: introduction to the special issue

Abstract

Tropical cyclones (TCs) are one of the most destructive natural phenomena in the world. The accompanied damaging winds, heavy precipitation, and storm surges have caused great economic losses and life casualties to human beings. There are eight disaster events related to TC among the top tenwhich caused the highest amount of insurance losses in the world. Frequency of TC genesis in the western North Pacific is the highest in the global ocean basins, and there are nine on average making landfall in China annually. Most of these landfalling TCs (LTCs) strike the south-east coastal region of China with a dense population and developed economies. Some of them intrude deep inland or higherlatitude and cause severe flooding. The most recent example is Super Typhoon Lekima, which made landfall in east China on 10 August 2019. Lekima brought severe winds and precipitation to the Eastern and North-eastern China, from Fujian province all the way north to Heilongjiang province. The observed maximum wind is 61.4 m/s near the landfall point, and the maximum total precipitation reaches 831 mm. Chinese governments at all levels and China Meteorological Administration have always attached great importance to TC disaster prevention and reduction. Two five-year National Basic Research Program of China (973 Program) (Nos. 2009CB421500 and 2015CB452806) projects on LTCs were launched by the Ministry of Sciences and Technology in 2009 and 2015, respectively. The impact assessment of LTCs is one of the research focal points for both projects. Shanghai Typhoon Institute takes the lead in that part of the research for a consecutive of ten years in close collaboration with Chinese Academy of Meteorological Sciences. Significant progress has been made in TC disaster risk zoning at county levels, TC forecast uncertainty analyses, TC impact assessment using remote sensing technique, pre-assessment of LTC-related engineering damages, landslides potential, and inundation risk at a high resolution up to meters or tens of meters, and so on. This special issue of Frontiers of Earth Science is initiated by Shanghai Typhoon Institute in the final year of the implementation period of the second 973 Program (No. 2015CB452806), with an aim to collect research articles which provide further insight into the activities of TCs and the developments in methods that are being used to assess the impact of LTCs. A total of 15 peer-reviewed papers are selected for publication at a variety of topics related to LTCs, including TC impact assessment index development, new remote sensing exploring techniques, new forecast techniques, fine structure and abrupt intensity change analyses, observation and forecast uncertainty analyses, and so on.