Tropical Cyclone Wind 50 Years Return Period (km/h)

The tropical cyclonic strong wind and storm surge hazard model uses information from 2594 historical tropical cyclones besides data on topography, terrain roughness, and bathymetry. The historical tropical cyclones used in the cyclone wind and storm surge hazard model for the GAR Atlas cover the five different oceanic basins: Northeast Pacific, Northwest Pacific, South Pacific, North Indian, South Indian and North Atlantic. In all cases, the data associated to each track were obtained from the IBTrACS database (Knapp et al., 2010). Topography data from the Shuttle Radar Topography Mission (SRTM) of NASA, which provides terrain elevation grids at a 90 meters resolution, delivered by quadrants over the world was used and, additionally, to account for surface roughness, polygons of urban areas worldwide were obtained from the Socioeconomic Data and Applications Centre, SEDAC (CIESIN et al., 2011). A digital bathymetry model, with a spatial resolution of 30 arc-seconds, from the GEBCO_08 (General Bathymetric Chart of the Oceans) Grid Database of the British Oceanographic Data Centre (2009) was used. More information about the cyclone wind and storm surge hazard model can be found in Cardona et al., 2015. Hazard analysis was performed using the software CAPRA Team Tropical Cyclones Hazard Modeler (Bernal, 2014).