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It's kind of an abuse of the term. The technical definition is a storm that according to historical records has a 1% chance of happening in any given year. So y
by rtkwe 5y ago
It's kind of an abuse of the term. The technical definition is a storm that according to historical records has a 1% chance of happening in any given year. So you'd expect to see it at least once in 100 years. As climate change increases the severity of all types of weather those level of storms will get more common than in the past in a hard to predict way. The storm percentages are also based on the historical record instead of future predictions so it will inherently lag behind the expected increasing storm frequency/intensity.
- jensensbutton 5y agoI wish they'd talk about it in these terms. It's easier to think about the cost/benefit of investing in mitigations when faced with "you have an n% chance of incurring m billions in damage this year" vs "x billion dollar damage storms should only occur once every y years". We do it all the time with e.g. cloud SLAs.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- phonon 5y agoA probability of 1% per year means 1 - .99^100 = 63.4% probability of at least 1 storm in a hundred years.
- karatinversion 5y agoThe expected value of how many years until such a storm occurs is 100 years.
- phonon 5y ago"A common misunderstanding is that a 100-year flood is likely to occur only once in a 100-year period. In fact, there is approximately a 63.4% chance of one or more 100-year floods occurring in any 100-year period." [1] Which is different than "You'd expect to see it at least once in 100 years." However, yes, the expected value of the number of 100-year floods occurring in any 100-year period is 1. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/100-year_flood#Probability https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/100-year_flood#Probability