Australian bushfires worry insurers less than cyclones and floods

Peter Hannam in the Sydney Morning Herald (Australia): With large parts of the country under threat during this bushfire season, it seems counter-intuitive - if not insensitive - to downplay the economic risks. With both Victoria and New South Wales declaring total fire bans and with bushfire researchers warning the danger period has barely begun, moves to minimise potential losses might also seem premature.

Still, while the costs of the latest fires are not trivial - 525 claims for $52.5 million for the Tasmanian fires alone - the reality is only a fraction of a typical premium reflecting bushfire risk, according to Karl Sullivan, the general manager policy risk and disaster planning at the Insurance Council of Australia. ''[It's] in the vicinity of less than 2 per cent,'' Sullivan says. ''Internal fires from kitchen fires and things like that rate higher.''

The insurance industry does not dismiss the human and financial costs from bushfires. Victoria's 2009 Black Saturday bushfires killed 173 people and destroyed more than 2000 homes. A report issued this week by Suncorp, one of the country's biggest insurers, noted the blazes cost at least $4 billion. Of that, the federal government spent $468 million on relief and disaster recovery, the state government $269 million and the insurance industry $1.07 billion.

But for the industry, bushfires are another of the major hazards facing Australians and less of a worry to insurers than tropical cyclones and floods. The reinsurance giant Munich Re says research shows Australia is more exposed than other regions to climate change but fire is not the foremost hazard, according to Ernst Rauch, head of the company's corporate climate centre.

Longer term, ''water and precipitation are probably the most significant issues related to climate change, in both directions'', he says....

Bushfire smoke over Melbourne in 2009, shot by Nick carson, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license

Thousands flee floods as cyclone batters Solomon Islands

Terra Daily via AFP: Thousands of people were forced to flee rapidly rising rivers in the Solomon Islands, officials said Sunday as Cyclone Freda intensified into a "destructive" force storm and headed towards New Caledonia.

Wind gusts had strengthened to more than 231 kilometres per hour (144 miles per hour, 125 knots) as Freda developed into a powerful category four storm, said Sajay Prakesh at the Nadi Tropical Cyclone Centre in Fiji. "These winds are very destructive and can cause huge damage to infrastructure and buildings," he told AFP.

Freda is expected to reach New Caledonia on New Year's Day and "given its current form if it hits New Caledonia Freda will cause huge damage, as it will blow strong winds and heavy rain for six to seven hours".

As the cyclone moved across the Solomons it lashed the South Pacific archipelago, whipping roofs off houses, flattening trees and forcing people to flee rising rivers. Thousands of people from riverside villages had moved to the safety of higher ground, National Disaster Management Office director Loti Yates said….

Cyclone Freda on December 30, 2012, from NASA

Cyclone Freda tears roofs off houses in Solomon Islands

Terra Daily via AFP: Freshly formed Cyclone Freda whipped roofs off houses and flattened trees in the Solomon Islands as it gathered strength en route to New Caledonia, forecasters said Saturday.

There was also flooding from rising rivers as winds of up to 130 kilometres an hour (80 mph) blew in, but there were no reports of deaths or injuries, Solomon Islands Meteorological Service officer Manoah Tepa said.

"Cyclone Freda is now a category two cyclone and it is continuing to intensify. It will become category three by midnight tonight having very destructive winds," said Sajay Prakesh of the Nadi Tropical Cyclone Centre in Fiji.

Although the cyclone was moving away, parts of the Solomon Islands were being hit by "very strong winds and heavy rain," said Prakesh....

Cyclone Freda on December 28, 2012

Fresh cyclone brews in Pacific

Terra Daily via AFP: A fresh cyclone was brewing in the South Pacific Friday, forecasters said, just two weeks after destructive Cyclone Evan caused widespread devastation in Samoa and Fiji.

A cyclone warning has been issued for the Solomon Islands which are expected to bear the brunt of winds in excess of 100 kilometres an hour (60 mph) over the weekend before the storm swings towards New Caledonia.

Although it was in its formative stages Friday, the US Joint Typhoon Warning Centre said it had the potential to develop into a "significant tropical cyclone" over the next 24 hours. In the Solomon Islands, fishermen were urged not to go to sea and people living in coastal areas were advised to move to higher ground.

Chief forecaster Manoah Tepa told reporters "rough seas, heavy rain and strong winds" were expected. New Zealand-based meteorological service Weatherwatch said the storm, expected to be named Freda, was expected to be over New Caledonia on New Year's Day....

Tropical Cyclone Evan on December 19, 2012, in a NASA mug shot

Typhoon-hit Philippines threatened by new storm

Terra Daily via AFP: A tropical storm set to hit the Philippines on Christmas Day could spark floods and landslides, forecasters warned, even as the country struggles to recover from a typhoon that killed hundreds.

Tropical Storm Wukong is expected to bring strong winds and heavy rain to southern island Dinagat from 10:00 pm (1400 GMT), as well as nearby islands Samar and Leyte, the state weather service said.

"These could bring floods and landslides, particularly in landslide-prone areas like southern Leyte and Samar," the service's Nathaniel Servando said.

Servando said storm surges of up to four metres (13 feet) were also expected on the coasts of the three islands.

However, he said the storm was expected to spare the large southern island of Mindanao, which was devastated by Typhoon Bopha earlier this month.

Wukong would pass northwest across the central islands Wednesday and blow out to the South China Sea on Thursday, he said....

Tropical Storm Wukong on Christmas day

Climate model is first to study climate effects of Arctic hurricanes

EurekAlert: Though it seems like an oxymoron, Arctic hurricanes happen, complete with a central "eye," extreme low barometric pressure and towering 30-foot waves that can sink small ships and coat metal platforms with thick ice, threatening oil and gas exploration. Now climate scientists at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and in England report the first conclusive evidence that Arctic hurricanes, also known as polar lows, play a significant role in driving ocean water circulation and climate.

Results point to potentially cooler conditions in Europe and North America in the 21st century than other models predict.

Geoscientist Alan Condron at UMass Amherst and Ian Renfrew at the University of East Anglia, U.K., write in the current issue of Nature Geoscience that every year thousands of these strong cyclones or polar lows occur over Arctic regions in the North Atlantic, but none are simulated by the latest climate prediction models, which makes it difficult to reliably forecast climate change in Europe and North America over the next couple of decades.

"Before polar lows were first seen by satellites, sailors frequently returned from the Arctic seas with stories of encounters with fierce storms that seemed to appear out of nowhere," says Condron, a physical oceanographer. "Because of their small size, these storms were often missing from their weather charts, but they are still capable of producing hurricane-force winds and waves over 11 meters high (36 feet)."

He and Renfrew say that despite the fact that literally thousands of polar lows occur over the Arctic region of the North Atlantic ocean every year, none are simulated by even the most sophisticated climate models. To understand the importance of these storms on climate, Condron and Renfrew therefore turned to a new, state-of-the-art climate model to simulate the high wind speeds associated with these "missing" storms.

"By using higher resolution modeling we can more accurately simulate the high wind speeds and influence of polar lows on the ocean," Condron says. "The lower-resolution models currently used to make climate predictions very much miss the level of detail required to accurately simulate these storms."....

This photo-like image of a subtropical storm was acquired by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on the Terra satellite on November 1, 2006. Located 900 miles off the coast of Oregon in the northwestern Pacific, this storm system looks like a hurricane, but it is located far from any of the typical hurricane formation areas. The storm originally formed from a cold-cored extratropical storm, but after sending two days over anomalously warm water, it developed a warm center and the hurricane characteristics of a cloud-free eye and an eyewall of thunderstorms circling the eye. Though the storm was strong enough to be named had it formed in one of the hurricane sectors, it is outside the regions which hurricane monitoring organizations administer, so the authority to give it a full name is not well defined. As of November 2, 2006, the Central Pacific Hurricane Center in Honolulu had not issued any information on the storm nor even applied it with a name. It was known merely as Storm 91C by the U.S. Navy.

Trail of destruction after Cyclone Evan hits Fiji

Terra Daily via AFP: Tropical Cyclone Evan left a swathe of destruction across Fiji Tuesday after battering the Pacific nation for more than 12 hours, destroying homes, flooding rivers and stranding thousands of tourists. Despite the damage, officials reported no fatalities as the storm headed out to sea early Tuesday and was downgraded a notch to category three.

Western parts of the main island Viti Levu bore the brunt of the cyclone's fury overnight, with the Fiji Times describing the township of Lautoka as a "war zone". Witnesses said entire houses were blown away by the ferocious winds, leaving stunned residents to clean up debris from empty lots after they returned from evacuation centres.

"The destruction this cyclone has caused is beyond words. Not one house has been spared here," Lautoka resident Melaia Waisele told AFP. The information ministry said bridges were submerged by swollen rivers, high winds toppled power lines and roads were closed by landslides and debris.

Almost 8,500 locals sheltered from the cyclone in evacuation centres, while thousands of international tourists, almost 3,000 of them relocated from outlying islands for their own safety, rode out the storm in Viti Levu's resorts....

Tropical Cyclone Evan on December 13, 2012. NASA

Philippines typhoon death toll tops 1000

Terra Daily via AFP: The death toll from a typhoon that devastated the southern Philippines earlier this month has topped 1,000 as hundreds more remain missing, the government said on Sunday.

Typhoon Bopha killed 1,020 people, mostly on the southern island of Mindanao where floods and landslides caused major damage on December 4, civil defence chief Benito Ramos said.

A total of 844 people remain missing, about half of them fishermen who ventured out to sea before Bopha hit, Ramos said, adding he feared many of the missing were dead.

"The death toll will go higher. We found a lot of bodies yesterday, buried under fallen logs and debris," he told AFP.

He added the toll from Bopha, the worst natural disaster to hit the country this year, would exceed the 1,268 confirmed dead after Typhoon Washi struck the southern Philippines in December 2011.

From NASA: Typhoon Bopha on December 3, 2012

Philippines typhoon death toll tops 900

Terra Daily via AFP: The death toll from the strongest typhoon to hit the Philippines this year has climbed above 900, with hundreds still missing, the government said Thursday.

Typhoon Bopha killed 902 people mostly on the southern island of Mindanao, where floods and landslides caused major damage in nearly 2,000 villages on December 4, the civil defence office said.

A total of 615 people remain missing, it said, a big reduction from the previous tally after rescuers found 296 tuna fishermen who had put to sea before Bopha made landfall. The government agency did not give further details.

The typhoon, the deadliest natural disaster to hit the Philippines this year, destroyed 149,000 houses, it said.

About 80,000 people remain in government shelters, where they face months in difficult, crowded conditions as relief officials look for safe areas to build more permanent shelters.

Typhoon reduces Philippine farmers to beggars

Seed Daily via AFP: The secluded valley that sheltered Jerry Blanco's banana crop from communist and Muslim rebellions offered no refuge from Typhoon Bopha, which left him destitute in seconds.

Last week's terrifying storm has left more than 1,600 people dead or missing in the southern Philippines, and all but wiped out the banana plantations that are one of the desperately poor country's few export earners.

"First the strong wind came, then a sheet of rain. Our roof rattled, the house creaked and then the wall was blown away," Blanco, a 39-year-old plantation worker, told AFP in the southern Philippines.

"I looked out across the field, and all the (banana stalks) were felled. Our harvest was gone. The first thought in my mind was, we've just lost our future," the father of four said....

Philippines typhoon toll tops 700, hundreds missing

Terra Daily via AFP: The death toll from the strongest typhoon to hit the Philippines this year has climbed above 700 with hundreds more missing, many of them tuna fishermen feared lost at sea, the government said Tuesday.

Typhoon Bopha, which unleashed floods and landslides across the main southern island of Mindanao on December 4, has killed at least 714 people and obliterated entire communities, the civil defence office said.

It said nearly 115,000 houses were destroyed and more than 116,000 people remain in crowded government shelters, where they face months of waiting for new housing to be built....

A NASA shot of Typhoon Bopha, intensifying into a Category 1 typhoon on December 7, 2012, in the South China Sea.  This storm has killed many and done tremendous damage to the Philippines

Killer typhoon turns back towards Philippines

Space Daily via AFP: A typhoon that has killed hundreds of people and left tens of thousands homeless in the southern Philippines has turned back towards the country and will hit it again, forecasters said Saturday.

Typhoon Bopha will slam into the northern tip of the main island of Luzon early Sunday, packing gusts of up to 160 kilometres (around 100 miles) an hour, the state weather service said.

It was likely to bring heavy rainfall to the area, civil defence office director Benito Ramos told a news conference. "People there need to take precautions," he added.

The eye of the cyclone was 230 kilometres west of the northern town of Sinait at 4:00pm (0800 GMT) and moving slowly northeast, the service said.

Heavy to intense rainfall was expected within the typhoon's 400-kilometre footprint, it added…

Philippines early warning system saves lives as thousands flee Typhoon Bopha

UNISDR News Archive: The UN Office for Disaster Reduction (UNISDR) today praised the improved performance of early warning systems in the Philippines as Typhoon Bopha cut a swathe of destruction across the country resulting in over 200 deaths and significant economic losses.

UNISDR Head of Regional Office for Asia, Jerry Velasquez, said: "This time last year over 1,400 people died on Mindanao in a similar event but this time big improvements in the early warning systems have saved many lives. More than 167,000 people have been evacuated to shelters."

He singled out the new automated rainfall and flood prediction systems as being critical to the provision of accurate forecasts and timely warnings as part of Project NOAH (Nationwide Operational Assessment of Hazards), introduced earlier this year by the Department of Science and Technology at the request of President Benigno S. Aquino.

"The Government's NOAH Project has enabled central government agencies, local governments and citizens to prepare and act before intense weather arrives. The project includes dissemination through television and the Internet of real-time satellite, Doppler radar, and other weather information enabling people to see not only wind speed and location of incoming weather disturbance but also the possible amount of precipitation.

…"Once Project NOAH is completely deployed across the country by the end of 2013, and local governments start acting based on its information, we should start to see a significant drop in the numbers of lives lost to disasters in the Philippines. However, the country also needs to respond to the enormous economic losses which these entail. About 0.8% of GDP is lost each year to disasters and this takes an unacceptably high toll on the country's development and efforts at poverty reduction."...

Typhoon Bopha on December 1, a category 4 storm (shot by NASA)

Typhoon kills at least 283 in Philippines

Eric de Castro in Reuters: Blocked roads and severed communications in the southern Philippines frustrated rescuers on Wednesday as teams searched for hundreds of people missing after the strongest typhoon this year killed at least 283 people.

Typhoon Bopha, with central winds of 120 kph (75 mph) and gusts of up to 150 kph (93 mph), battered beach resorts and dive spots on Palawan island on Wednesday but it was weakening as it moved west. Hardest hit was the southern island of Mindanao, where Bopha made landfall on Tuesday. It triggered landslides and floods along the coast and in farming and mining towns inland.

Interior Minister Manuel Roxas said 300 people were missing. "Entire families were washed away," Roxas, who inspected the disaster zone, told reporters.

...According to tallies provided by the military and disaster agency officials, 283 people were killed....

The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Aqua satellite captured this natural-color, high definition image of powerful, strengthening, Typhoon Bopha, as a category 4 super typhoon, with winds of 240km/h and a pressure of 935hpa at the time the image was taken on December 2, 2012

'Black swan' storms: extreme cyclones linked to warming seas

Becky Oskin in Our Amazing Planet: A "black swan" cyclone may sound like the latest comic book hero, but this "extreme of the extremes" is the result of climate models that suggest global warming will make future hurricanes more intense.

The rare monster tropical cyclones (the term for hurricanes, typhoons and other tropical storms) could inundate coastal areas with storm surges greater than 15 feet (4.6 meters), and could even surpass 30 feet (9 m) in some regions of the world. The research was described here yesterday (Dec. 3) at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union.

By simulating thousands of possible future storms, researchers identified the outliers that could hit coastal areas in the future but that wouldn't show up in predictions based solely on historical records, said Ning Lin, a professor at Princeton University. The scientists relied on the same model the National Weather Service uses to predict hurricane activity for a given season.

...Even though Hurricane Sandy broke several records and generated tremendous storm surge, the superstorm was not a black swan, Lin said. The simulated storm surges calculated by the model for New York, at up to 16 feet, top the record set by Hurricane Sandy, at 14 feet (4.3 m) — part of which was the high tide at the time....

The Brooklyn waterfront during Hurricane Sandy, shot by lookcatalog, Wikimedia Commons via Flickr,  under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license

Typhoon hits south Philippines, 40 dead or missing

Reuters: The strongest typhoon to hit the Philippines this year pounded the southern island of Mindanao on Tuesday and about 40 people were dead or missing, media said, after the storm destroyed homes and brought down power and communication lines.

Typhoon Bopha, with wind gusts of up to 195 kph (121 mph), made landfall at dawn, uprooting trees and tearing off roofs.

About 40 people were killed or missing in flash floods and landslides near a mining area on Mindanao, ABS-CBN television reported, saying waters and soil had swept through an army post.

A television reporter said she saw numerous bodies lined up near the army base. A military spokesman earlier said about 20 people, including six soldiers, were missing....

On December 1, NASA took this image of Typhoon Bopha, when it was a Category 4 storm.