Hurricane damage assessment for residential constructionconsidering the non-stationarity in hurricane intensity andfrequency

Natural hazards such as hurricanes may cause extensive economic losses and social disruption for civilstructures and infrastructures in coastal areas, implying the importance of understanding the constructionperformance subjected to hurricanes and assessing the hurricane damages properly. The intensity andfrequency of hurricanes have been reported to change with time due to the potential impact of climate change.In this paper, a probability-based model of hurricane damage assessment for coastal constructions isproposed taking into account the non-stationarity in hurricane intensity and frequency. The non-homogeneous Poisson process is employed to model the non-stationarity in hurricane occurrence while thenon-stationarity in hurricane intensity is reflected by the time-variant statistical parameters （e.g., mean valueand/or standard deviation）, with which the mean value and variation of the cumulative hurricane damage areevaluated explicitly. The Miami-Dade County, Florida, USA, is chosen to illustrate the hurricane damageassessment method proposed in this paper. The role of non-stationarity in hurricane intensity and occurrencerate due to climate change in hurricane damage is investigated using some representative changing patterns ofhurricane parameters.