Summers J K, Lamper A, McMillion C, Harwell L C
United States Environmental Protection Agency, Office of Research and Development, Center for Measurements and Modeling, Gulf Breeze, FL 32561, USA.
Sustainability. 2022 Mar 31;14(7):1-23. doi: 10.3390/su14074158.
There is increasing evidence from across the globe that climate change results in changes in the frequency, location, and impact of natural hazards. Much of this evidence is conceptual, inferential, or simply assumed. To provide objective support to confirm these hypotheses, we constructed county-level time-series datasets (2000-2019) for nine natural hazards for the entire United States. Hazards considered for this study included hurricanes, tropical storms, landslides, wildfires, earthquakes, drought, inland flooding, coastal flooding, and tornadoes. Geospatial analysis techniques were used to calculate the percentage (range: 0-100) of land area in each county exposed to each natural hazard for all the years that hazard data were available. The best available data were acquired from publicly accessible sources. Cumulative distribution functions were calculated for each hazard in five-year intervals to test for statistically significant changes in distribution patterns across the five-year time periods using the Kolmogorov-Smirnov test. There were significant changes in hurricanes, tropical storms, and drought over the two decades; changes in tornadoes, landslides, and wildfires were not significant in terms of frequency, likely due to the site-specific nature of their occurrences. The intensity and spatial distribution and an emerging hot spot and spatial trend analyses and an emerging hot spot and spatial trend analyses were also completed (except for flooding events and earthquakes due to insufficient data). All datasets provide empirical support for earlier inferences concerning the connections between the hazards and climate change. Analyses showed apparent changes in the frequency and intensity of hurricanes, tropical storms, and drought-related to climate change factors. Internal and coastal flooding also demonstrated these connections, although the length of the dataset did not permit significant testing but shows significant hot spots and trending locations. Tornadoes, landslides, and wildfires showed significant hot spots and trending locations, but the specific locational nature of the data did not show significant changes in frequency. Earthquakes showed no significant changes over the time period.
全球范围内越来越多的证据表明，气候变化导致自然灾害的频率、地点和影响发生变化。这些证据大多是概念性的、推断性的，或者仅仅是假设的。为了提供客观支持以证实这些假设，我们构建了美国全境九个自然灾害的县级时间序列数据集（2000 - 2019年）。本研究考虑的灾害包括飓风、热带风暴、山体滑坡、野火、地震、干旱、内陆洪水、沿海洪水和龙卷风。利用地理空间分析技术计算了在有灾害数据的所有年份里，每个县遭受每种自然灾害的土地面积百分比（范围：0 - 100）。可获取的最佳数据来自公开可用的来源。以五年为间隔计算每种灾害的累积分布函数，使用柯尔莫哥洛夫 - 斯米尔诺夫检验来检验五年时间段内分布模式的统计显著变化。在这二十年中，飓风、热带风暴和干旱发生了显著变化；龙卷风、山体滑坡和野火在频率方面的变化不显著，可能是由于其发生具有特定地点的性质。还完成了强度和空间分布以及新兴热点和空间趋势分析（由于数据不足，洪水事件和地震除外）。所有数据集都为早期关于灾害与气候变化之间联系的推断提供了实证支持。分析表明，与气候变化因素相关的飓风、热带风暴和干旱的频率和强度发生了明显变化。内陆和沿海洪水也显示出这些联系，尽管数据集的长度不允许进行显著检验，但显示出显著的热点和趋势位置。龙卷风、山体滑坡和野火显示出显著的热点和趋势位置，但数据的特定位置性质并未显示频率有显著变化。在该时间段内，地震没有显著变化。
