Forget about the price tags for tornadoes, hurricanes, floods, heat-waves and other extremes -- just the routine variations of daily weather cost the U.S. economy some $485 billion a year, a new study says.
This "initial estimate" -- 3.4 percent of the nation's gross domestic product -- is the first study of its kind to apply hard-number economic analysis to the weather sensitivity of the U.S. economy as a whole. Earlier estimates apply only to one economic sector or another.
"It's clear the economy isn't weatherproof," economist Jeffrey Lazo, at the National Center For Atmospheric Research said in a statement issued by the Boulder-based facility. The study, by Lazo and colleagues at the University of Colorado-Boulder, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California, is being published in this month's issue of the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society.
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The costs are spread across the country and throughout the economy. The authors also observed that "when aggregated across all 11 (economic) sectors, no one part of the country appears significantly more weather sensitive than another region in relative terms."
The estimate may be even higher if all of the costs of extreme weather episodes were included, although Lazo is reluctant to make that assumption. Some of the impact of extreme weather events "may be captured in the data we have," Lazo told Discovery News, but the pluses and minuses of such impacts are especially complex from an economic perspective. Similarly, the cost potential of our changing climate is unexamined by this study.
Unlike most other estimates, this analysis calculates not only the negative impacts such as additional air conditioning costs for days that are warmer than normal, but also the positive benefits that sunny days may have on economic sectors such as the construction industry. The authors noted that "when there are economic 'losers' because of a weather event there are also likely winners that offset these impacts when considered from an economy-wide perspective."
The researchers said this first-estimate "baseline" analysis of weather sensitive could help policymakers evaluate weather-protection investments as well as the value of improved forecasts.
"With $485 billion in potential impacts at 2008 levels, it should be obvious this is no small matter," they wrote.
IMAGE: A forecast map of typical June weather over the United States. Credit: National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration
Tags: Everyday Science, Meteorology
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