The political economy of natural disaster damage

Economic damage from natural hazards can sometimes be prevented and always mitigated. However, private individuals tend to underinvest in such measures due to problems of collective action, information asymmetry and myopic behavior. Governments, which can in principle correct these market failures, themselves face incentives to underinvest in costly disaster prevention policies and damage mitigation regulations. Yet, disaster damage varies greatly across countries. We argue that rational actors will invest more in trying to prevent and mitigate damage the larger a country's propensity to experience frequent and strong natural hazards. Accordingly, economic loss from an actually occurring disaster will be smaller the larger a country's disaster propensity – holding everything else equal, such as hazard magnitude, the country's total wealth and per capita income. At the same time, damage is not entirely preventable and smaller losses tend to be random. Disaster propensity will therefore have a larger marginal effect on larger predicted damages than on smaller ones. We employ quantile regression analysis in a global sample to test these predictions, focusing on the three disaster types causing the vast majority of damage worldwide: earthquakes, floods and tropical cyclones

Multiple Scenario Generation of Subsurface Models:Consistent Integration of Information from Geophysical and Geological Data throuh Combination of Probabilistic Inverse Problem Theory and Geostatistics

Neutrinos with energies above 1017 eV are detectable with the Surface Detector Array of the Pierre Auger Observatory. The identification is efficiently performed for neutrinos of all flavors interacting in the atmosphere at large zenith angles, as well as for Earth-skimming \u3c4 neutrinos with nearly tangential trajectories relative to the Earth. No neutrino candidates were found in 3c 14.7 years of data taken up to 31 August 2018. This leads to restrictive upper bounds on their flux. The 90% C.L. single-flavor limit to the diffuse flux of ultra-high-energy neutrinos with an E\u3bd-2 spectrum in the energy range 1.0 7 1017 eV -2.5 7 1019 eV is E2 dN\u3bd/dE\u3bd < 4.4 7 10-9 GeV cm-2 s-1 sr-1, placing strong constraints on several models of neutrino production at EeV energies and on the properties of the sources of ultra-high-energy cosmic rays

Studying the influence of groundwater representations on land surface-atmosphere feedbacks during the European heat wave in 2003

The impact of 3D groundwater dynamics as part of the hydrologic cycle is rarely considered in regional climate simulation experiments. However, there exists a spatial and temporal connection between groundwater and soil moisture near the land surface, which can influence the land surface-atmosphere feedbacks during heat waves. This study assesses the sensitivity of bedrock-to-atmosphere simulations to groundwater representations at the continental scale during the European heat wave 2003 using an integrated fully coupled soil-vegetation-atmosphere model. The analysis is based on the comparison of two groundwater configurations: (1) 3D physics-based variably saturated groundwater dynamics and (2) a 1D free drainage (FD) approach. Furthermore, two different subsurface hydrofacies distributions (HFD) account for the uncertainty of the subsurface hydraulic characteristics, and ensemble simulations address the uncertainty arising from different surface-subsurface initial conditions. The results show that the groundwater representation significantly impacts land surface-atmosphere processes. Differences between the two groundwater configurations follow subsurface patterns, and the largest differences are observed for shallow water table depths. While the physics-based setup is less sensitive to the HFD, the parameterized FD simulations are highly sensitive to the hydraulic characteristics of the subsurface. An analysis of variance shows that both, the groundwater configuration and the HFD, induce variability across all compartments with decreasing impact from the subsurface to the atmosphere, while the initial condition has only a minor impact

Initial results of fully coupled water cycle EURO-CORDEX evaluation simulations with TerrSysMP from 1989-2008

Initial results of fully coupled water cycle EURO-CORDEX evaluationsimulations with TerrSysMP from 1989-2008Ketan Kulkarni (1,4), Jessica Keune (2,3,4), Fabian Gasper (2,4), Wendy Sharples (1,4), Bibi Naz (2,4), KlausGoergen (2,4), Stefan Kollet (2,4)(1) SimLab Terrestrial Systems, Jülich Supercomputing Centre, Research Centre Jülich, Jülich, Germany, (2) Institute of Bio-and Geosciences, Agrosphere (IBG-3), Research Centre Jülich, Jülich, Germany, (3) Meteorological Institute, BonnUniversity, Bonn, Germany, (4) Centre for High-Performance Scientific Computing in Terrestrial Systems, GeoverbundABC/J, Jülich, GermanyInteractions and feedbacks between the sub-surface including groundwater, the land surface and the atmosphereare highly relevant for weather and the climate system. However, many state of the art global and regional earthsystem models do not consider the impacts of groundwater dynamics, which are critical for the closure of thehydrological cycle on different spatial and temporal scales. In this study we implement the coupled Terrestrial Sys-tems Modelling Platform over the EURO-CORDEX domain for evaluation experiments in line with the CORDEXexperiment design in order to study how the explicit treatment of groundwater affects states and fluxes of theterrestrial water and energy cycle over a continental domain on longer simulation time spans and in relation to ex-isting uncoupled EURO-CORDEX RCM simulations. The Terrestrial Systems Modelling Platform (TerrSysMP) isa fully coupled scale-consistent numerical modelling system, currently consisting of the COSMO NWP model, theCommunity Land Model (CLM) and the ParFlow variably saturated surface and subsurface hydrological model,coupled with the external coupler OASIS3(-MCT). TerrSysMP allows for a physically-based representation oftransport processes across scales down to sub-km resolution with explicit feedbacks between the individual com-partments, including 3D groundwater dynamics and a full representation of the terrestrial hydrological cycle. Theland surface-groundwater subsystem is spun up with a 1979-1989 cyclic climatological forcing derived from ERA-Interim reanalysis until an equilibrated groundwater state is achieved. Using this as the initial conditions, the fullycoupled simulation for the period from 1989 to 2008 are carried out over the EURO-CORDEX domain at 12 kmresolution using ERA-Interim as lateral boundary forcing. COSMO physics settings are in line with the CCLMconsortium runs done for EURO-CORDEX to allow for a better comparison. The JUBE2 (Juelich BenchmarkingEnvironment) workflow engine is used to manage the complex operation of the simulations. In the analysis, wediscuss the impact of groundwater on land atmosphere feedbacks and atmospheric boundary layer properties todemonstrate the added value of the coupled simulations. Several climate indices and performance metrics are usedover PRUDENCE analysis regions in a comparison with observational data