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Natural Disasters - Forecasting Hurricane Occurrence, Economic and Life Losses


Comparison of natural disaster fatalities in the United States. Cumulative size-frequency distributions for annual earthquake, flood, hurricane, and tornado fatalities. In addition to demonstrating linear scaling behavior over 2 to 3 orders of magnitude in loss, these data group into two families. Hurricanes and earthquakes are associated with relatively flat slopes (D= -0.4 to -0.6); while floods and tornadoes have steeper slopes (D= -1.3 to -1.4). Open symbols were not used to calculate slope of lines.

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U.S. Department of the Interior, U.S. Geological Survey, St. Peterburg Science Center
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Updated: 20 October, 2009 @ 04:16 PM (MLM)