Economic sector loss from influential tropical cyclones and relationship to associated rainfall and wind speed in China

Abstract Tropical cyclones caused significant national economic losses in China in recent decades. For alleviating these hydro-meteorological disasters, the spatiotemporal distributions of losses per economic sector and the associated rainfall and wind patterns of such influential tropical cyclones (ITCs) were estimated for China. Based on multiple reference databases and socio-economic data, ITCs losses for major economic sectors have been deduced. The obtained information plays an important role in the projection of sector losses of future ITCs affecting China. The total economic losses have been split into five major sector loss categories, comprising agriculture, industry, construction, transport, and business & others. About 37% of the total loss occurred in the industrial sector, occupying the largest proportion. High values were primarily distributed in the urban agglomerations of the Pearl River and Yangtze River deltas and along the mainland coast of the Taiwan Strait, with over 1 billion CNY per year. Significant upward trends are found in all of sectors except in agriculture, which shows a decreasing tendency for the period of 1984–2014. The years with the highest losses occurred in the mid-1990s, mid-2000s, and early 2010s, consistently affecting all sectors in all regions along the mainland coast. The southern part of China was most frequently affected by ITCs, with increasing trends in sector losses for most areas. The relationships between wind speed, rainfall and sector losses can be presented in the form of an exponential function. The results show that rainfall is more positively correlated with ITCs losses than wind speed. Here, the industry sector shows the largest correlation coefficient and highest growth rate, whereas the construction sector shows the lowest. In future, research should pay more attention on impacts of heavy rainfall triggered by ITCs in China.