Use of historical best track data to estimate typhoon wind hazard at selected sites in China

The coastal region in mainland China experiences typhoon wind hazard and risk. Since historical surface observations are scarce and of short period, the hazard assessment is often carried out using the typhoon wind field and track models. For a few major cities in the coastal region, there are differences among the return period values of the annual maximum typhoon wind speed estimated by different studies and by the Chinese design code. The publically availability of the best track dataset released from China Meteorological Administration (CMA) provides an opportunity to potentially assess and validate some of the results. The present study provides probabilistic characterizations of typhoon tracks for a circular subregion around each of the nine considered cities located in the coastal region of mainland China by using the best track data from CMA. It applies the developed probability models for the tracks to estimate the typhoon wind hazard for the nine cities using a subregion approach. The results show that the estimated wind hazard is relatively insensitive to the size of the subregion, but it is strongly influenced by the adopted probability distribution model for the central pressure difference as the return period increases. The results also show that the code recommended return period values for some sites are lower than those obtained in this study by up to 8 % for the return period of 50 and 100 years. Copyright Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2015