Josue Salazar, Building and validating geographically refined hurricane wind risk models for residential structures

Accurate estimation of risk to residential structures from hurricane winds is critical for emergency planning and post-event recovery. Fragility curves are widely used for assessing wind damage risk at the county and census tract levels in models such as HAZUS-MH. Large-scale evaluation of the predictive accuracy of these models has been hampered by the lack of detailed damage data. This research work has three aims: (1) to evaluate the predictive accuracy of fragility-curve based models at the census tract level using a comprehensive damage dataset for Harris County residences collected after Hurricane Ike (2008), (2) to demonstrate the need for geographically refined models of wind damage risk at spatial scales of one-kilometer square blocks and to analyze the performance of fragility-curve models at that level, and (3) to explore the sources of errors made by fragility-curve based models at the census tract and one-kilometer square block level using a statistical machine learning model constructed from twenty-one potential explanatory variables. Our results provide new insights for building the next generation of fragility-curve models for accurately predicting hurricane wind damage risk to residential structures at the spatial scale of one-kilometer square blocks.