Florida Gulf Coast University professor, Dr. Jo Muller, has spent much of her career studying the history of hurricanes and tropical storms, from how frequently they occur to how damaging they are. For instance, she studies past tropical cyclone activity using geological evidence found in core samples taken from lagoons and bays behind barrier islands.
While the National Hurricane Center does have a database on past tropical cyclones, it was incomplete and did not include comprehensive data on how many people had died in past storms. Another database compiled by a hurricane researcher had better fatality data but didn’t go past 2012.
So, Dr. Muller and her team set out to create a comprehensive database of Atlantic tropical cyclones (hurricanes and tropical storms) that impacted the continental United States since 1963, with a focus on how many people died as a direct result of storms, and what caused their deaths.
The results have now been published in a paper titled "Continental United States direct Atlantic tropical cyclone fatalities: 1963–2024" with a database that anyone can access. They show that most deaths due to tropical cyclones happen because of water impacts, not wind impacts – and that most of those fatalities were caused by freshwater flooding and not storm surge. The study, in part, hopes to help emergency managers better communicate inland flooding risks during damaging tropical storms. Click here to read the study and find the dataset.
We talk with her about the paper and its findings.
Guest:
Dr. Jo Muller is an Eminent Scholar & Professor in the Whitaker Institute of STEM Education (Department of Chemistry & Physics / College of Arts & Sciences) at Florida Gulf Coast University
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FULL TRANSCRIPT
Mike Kiniry
From WGCU News, this is Gulf Coast Life. I'm Mike Kiniry. Thanks for joining us. Florida Gulf Coast University professor Dr. Jo Muller has spent much of her career studying the history of hurricanes and tropical storms, from how frequently they occur to how damaging they are. For instance, she studies past tropical cyclone activity using geological evidence found in core samples. While the National Hurricane Center does have a database on past tropical cyclones, it was incomplete and did not include comprehensive data on how many people died in past storms. Another database compiled by a hurricane researcher had better fatality data, but did not go past 2012. So Dr. Muller and her team set out to create a comprehensive database of Atlantic tropical cyclones, meaning hurricanes and tropical storms, that impacted the continental United States since 1963, with a focus on how many people died as a direct result of storms and what caused their deaths. The results have now been published with a database that anyone can access. They show that most deaths due to tropical cyclones happen because of water impacts, not wind impacts. and that most of the fatalities were caused by freshwater flooding, not storm surge. The study, in part, hopes to help emergency managers better communicate inland flooding risks during damaging tropical storms. I spoke with Dr. Muller about the paper and its findings last week. Let's hear that now. Dr. Jo Muller is an eminent scholar and professor in the Whitaker Institute of STEM Education at Florida Gulf Coast University. Welcome back to the show, Dr. Muller.
Dr. Jo Muller
It's great to be here. Thanks for having me.
Mike Kiniry
How long have you been at FGCU now?
Dr. Jo Muller
It's my 15th year.
Mike Kiniry
Holy cow.
Speaker 3
I know.
Mike Kiniry
I looked it up. You were on the show in 2019, so I knew it was at least that many years. Right. What brought you to FGCU? We didn't have a water school or anything 15 years ago.
Dr. Jo Muller
No, we sure didn't. I was at the Woods Hole Oceanographic at the time. I had been a postdoctoral fellow there. I'd come out from Australia. Actually, I had a fellowship through the American Australian Foundation that was funded by the Murdoch family. And I had come out on that and then I was supposed to go back to Australia. That was one of the conditions of the award. And then at the time, Woods Hole kind of, I had this grant and they offered me a visiting kind of researcher position. And I thought, wow, of course. And then at that point, I was kind of applying for jobs back in Australia, but there's just not that many universities. So it's really competitive. And then I sort of started applying around the US and it was cold. It was like winter in New England. And they flew me down here. I was applying all over the country. And they flew me down here and they took me out on a boat.
Speaker 3
Yeah.
Dr. Jo Muller
And yeah, I just was like, I love this place. I loved the the faculty and Wyn Everham was on my search committee, Jamie McDonald, Mike Savarese.
Mike Kiniry
Some of the OG FGCs.
Dr. Jo Muller
Amazing guys, just amazing people. Sasha Wohlpart at the time. And I just fell in love with the campus, the field station. And yeah, it was an easy decision. And I've been here ever since. I love this place.
Mike Kiniry
And now that we do have the water school, it's probably like, you know, this is a great place to do the kind of science you do.
Dr. Jo Muller
Yeah, absolutely. And I think we were doing the science obviously before the Water School, but the Water School has just been this incredible vehicle for us as scientists and has been for me for my entire career here. Obviously, now I'm in the Whitaker Institute, which is in the College of Arts and Sciences, but it's been fabulous just this last year, just re-engaging with all the faculty that are in CAS as well, while still being very much with the Water School as well. So being able to work across these two great colleges has been really fun.
Mike Kiniry
You were on the show four years ago. We talked about your work on paleotempestology, which I just love that I wanted to have a chance to say that word on the radio again. Are you still working on that? I mean, if I can summarize, that's, you know, you're able to get historic hurricane data by collecting cores from underneath the back bays. Is that a way to put it?
Dr. Jo Muller
Yeah, it's perfect. Yeah, no, absolutely. Actually, that work is even more exciting than ever, I think. We are now coring blue holes, which are located offshore. So they're on the Southwest Florida platform. So that's that limestone platform we have out there. One of the reasons why we have bad storm surge here with certain types of storms. But the holes themselves are incredible for archiving sediments because they're very deep. And they're obviously low energy. They're like holes in the sea floor. And so sediment can accumulate down there and they tend to be anoxic as well. So it means there's like less burrowing and destroying of the record. They're just very difficult to core because you have to be on the surface of the ocean in a big ship that has dynamic positioning. And so it sort of sits over the hull and then you have to thread like almost like a needle we thread a vibracore down there all the way to the sediment water interface, which can be anywhere from like 40 meters to 50 meters at depth without getting the vibracore stuck in the hole. just to recover this incredible sediment. But that's probably a story.
Mike Kiniry
Yeah, well, I was going to say, we're going to have to have another show on paleotempestology because there's a lot of neat stuff there. But let's talk about the paper that we're here to talk about today. Are you the lead author on it? You're the first name. Does that mean you're lead author or are you like lead co-author?
Dr. Jo Muller
Yes, I am.
Mike Kiniry
And then you have co-authors, one of which is Dr. Phil Klotzbach, who's a hurricane. scientist out of Colorado that people might recognize.
Dr. Jo Muller
Yes, he's the OG of, well, he's not the OG, actually. His advisor was Bill Gray of seasonal forecasting. I think Phil's seasonal forecast is probably the most famous, but like the most accurate. And he's a colleague and a dear friend.
Mike Kiniry
So how did this study come to be? Like what was the beginning of you guys saying or you saying, there's a gap in some science, we can do some aggregating. Like how did the origin story begin?
Dr. Jo Muller
Yeah, so I just am really obviously obsessed with hurricane and understanding hurricane. And I really enjoy historical hurricanes. So we see them in the sedimentary record, the ones in the core top. And then we use them for validation. So if we're seeing them in the core top, then we know that those layers down below are hurricane layers. And so that's sort of how I started getting interested in just delving into these historical storms. So I was like, okay, well, there's this storm in the top. This is like Hurricane Donna, for example, 1960. What do we know about this storm? And that took me to these old reports. So the National Hurricane Center has reports called tropical cyclone reports. And in each report, they report on things like the storm itself, like pressure, wind, all the things. But the other pieces are the societal things like damage and fatalities. And there was a study published, a very, very old school hurricane scientist, Ed Rappaport, he's retired now from the National Hurricane Center, but he was tracking fatalities for a very long time. And he had published a couple studies, but the last studies were a very long time ago. And I had been asking the National Hurricane Center if they had the raw data. No one seemed to know where it was or what they were doing with it. And so at that point, I had talked to some colleagues. I said, I think we should just try to recreate this data set. So We've done that. We have gone back to 1963 and looked at each storm and fatalities from that storm, if there were fatalities. And we have looked at both direct fatalities and indirect fatalities. And then within those subgroups, we've then broken it down further by the actual cause. And now the paper just came out a few months ago and That data set now is available online to everyone. So the previous study by Ed, the raw data was not attached to the publication. So back in the day, I think you could get away with a lot with publications. Nowadays, most journals won't publish unless you provide the raw data. So now anyone can go in and grab that data. If you're an emergency manager and you want to understand the storms that have made landfall in your county, in the past and what people have, died from. You can go in and look at the data if you're a scientist, if you're interested in understanding, different sorts of storms and how they produce different types of fatalities. So we're excited about the data set and the work.
Mike Kiniry
So before we get to how you collected the data, because I want to talk a little bit more about that, I'm going to do an executive summary and you tell me how I did.
Dr. Jo Muller
Okay.
Mike Kiniry
Most deaths from tropical cyclones, does that mean hurricanes? Mostly.
Dr. Jo Muller
So this study includes both, and this is a really important point, it includes all hurricanes, so obviously cat one through five, but it also includes tropical storms. And what we found was that you see quite a few fatalities from tropical storms. In fact, some tropical storms you see a great deal of fatalities. So I think it's important for folks to understand that it's not just these really strong storms that can.
Mike Kiniry
Kill people. And it's Atlantic storms and it's continental United States.
Dr. Jo Muller
Exactly.
Mike Kiniry
So most deaths by storms are caused by water, like 80% or so, only 13% for wind. Most of the water are caused by fresh water, not storm surge, like 36% to 30% or something like that. Your primary goal is to get emergency managers in particular to communicate better to people who aren't on the coast, because that's where most of the deaths are happening. But you also point out that even though coastal populations have increased a lot, deaths have not necessarily increased proportionally. So we're doing a pretty good job of communicating the coastal areas, but not intercoastal or inland areas. How did I do?
Dr. Jo Muller
That's really great. That was really good.
Mike Kiniry
I did that without AI.
Dr. Jo Muller
That's amazing. You were using your brain. Yeah, there are a few caveats within that. of which we can talk about if you would like.
Mike Kiniry
Yeah, go ahead.
Dr. Jo Muller
So with the previous studies from Rappaport showed that storm surge, most deaths were from storm surge, but it was really kind of, it was based also back when that study was published. At the time, they were counting about 1,100 deaths from Katrina, direct fatalities. By direct fatalities, this is people that have died directly from the storm by a subset of perils. So you had mentioned a couple of them, storm surge, drowning, drowning from rainfall, drowning in surf. So that includes rip currents, drowning offshore, so boats capsizing, that sort of thing. So most of these deaths are occurring from drowning. And then you have your wind perils. So you have things like tornado and then wind from like blunt force trauma, collapsing structures. And then within that, you have also tree fall. Now, tree fall is actually one of the highest wind issues. People with Helene, we saw this actually, a lot of people died from trees falling on their house or on their car or on them. So with this breakdown from this recent study, when you look at the data from 1963 to present day, now in the past study from Rappaport, storm surge was kind of outpacing everything. But that was including the 1,000 deaths from Katrina, which now are reported, re-reported at 520. So that's changed the statistic A lot. And so the thing with storm surges, sometimes you have these storms that have such high fatalities, like Katrina, Camille, that they kind of, when you have these rare events, they overburden the statistics. So when it comes to, when we're looking at the entire data set, now rainfall accounts for 36% and then 33% for storm surge. But what we found is that rainfall deaths are far more common. So, you know, when you're looking at storms, one particular storm is far more common to cause a rainfall death than a surge death. So they're more common, they're definitely the biggest killer within the TC. And I think the communication piece is really crucial because, a lot of deaths obviously happen at the coast, especially from perils like storm surge. But we are finding that we have these high inland death tolls, like storms like Helene, for example, even storms like Agnes, so some of the oldest storms. And so I think that's very important to communicate to the public because often I feel like people When they think of hurricane, they're like mostly considering what's happening at the coastline and evacuating the coastline when we're clearly seeing this issue of precipitation. being the largest killer. And then also that the science now is becoming quite strong around this idea of increased precipitation with a warming atmosphere. So we have several papers that have come out just in the last five years that have shown studies from satellites. where we're seeing increased precipitation. And this is, fairly, some of it's fairly simple physics. As you have a warmer atmosphere, you can hold more water vapor. We feel this in Florida every year in the summer. I'm starting to feel it today. You can feel the humidity. And so that means that you can have a rainy storm. And now we're seeing that. in the actual numbers. So I think this idea of precipitation being very fatal and being the most fatal peril within the tropical cyclone or the hurricane is really important to communicate because it's probably not going to go away. It's possibly going to increase depending on what TCs do or hurricanes do as well going forward because that's not simple either. But yeah.
Mike Kiniry
It's almost like what storms you've experienced, the kinds of storms you think are the most dangerous. I was here for Charlie, so wind is a really big thing. And then I was here for Ian, and obviously surge is a really big thing. But then also rainfall was a big thing during Ian. but have you communicated this to people in the emergency management world? Are they dealing with it or somehow enacting with it?
Dr. Jo Muller
Yeah, 100%. So I actually work really closely with John Schultz at Lee County Emergency Management. He's our chief. Fantastic guy, great emergency manager, so thoughtful, and he's really looking forward all the time. It makes me feel good that I live in Lee County and he is the Chief of Emergency Management. So he's working on some of this research with us. We're looking at social vulnerability indexing right now for Lee County, starting in Lee County and trying to understand, you know, whether we're seeing fatalities in areas of different sort of social vulnerabilities. And he's really interested in that, obviously. And he's interested in understanding like, what parts of his county does he need to get to 1st or how does he prepare them better? So yes, I'm definitely working with different emergency managers. We have a couple of ongoing projects and ones that are coming up where we're hoping to engage more emergency managers. But yeah, I think they're very much aware of it. But I think it's a challenge for them to communicate the real importance, I think, of these sorts of topics, yeah.
Mike Kiniry
I'm talking today with Dr. Jo Moeller. She's an eminent scholar and professor in the Whitaker Institute of STEM Education in the College of Arts and Sciences at Florida Gulf Coast University. Professor Moeller is an expert on threats due to impacts from hurricanes and climate change in tropical and subtropical areas. She's the lead author of a new paper published in the Nature Portfolio Journal Natural Hazards, titled Continental United States Direct Atlantic Tropical Cyclone Fatalities 1963 to 2024. It provides an update to tropical cyclone fatalities, 1963 to 2024. It provides an update to existing data on how and why people died during hurricanes and tropical storms in the continental United States and creates A publicly accessible database of deaths caused by Atlantic tropical cyclones in the US since 1963. What were the, we don't have a ton of time to go over it, but what were the various data sets that you were able to aggregate, because it was quite a few of them. And it seemed like they were all kind of incomplete in their own way. So it must have been an interesting cobbling together of columns.
Dr. Jo Muller
Yeah, so the National Hurricane Center, there's so few of them over there. I think we all assume that there's like a ton of hurricane centers.
Mike Kiniry
Especially now. There's fewer now than there were a few years ago.
Dr. Jo Muller
Yeah, and they're just all kind of obviously overworked, like many of us, but I think This is not, their main mission is to forecast. And so I think it's very difficult for them to find the time to make sure the reporting is like, it's a big lift. And so nowadays, after each storm, they write a tropical cyclone report. And some of these reports are very long, like the Ian report is massive. And so within that report, they break down the fatalities. and where they occur. So we went through these reports, but as you go back in time, the reports are not what they are today. They're older and written different and don't have the same amount of data. That's why we only went back to 1963, because before 1963, none of the reports really break down the deaths by peril. So they'll just say 50 people died in this storm, and they won't say whether it was direct or indirect or what they died of. And so, but beyond The tropical cyclone reports only started in 1995. So everything beyond that, we use the monthly weather review, which is a journal article. And at the end of each hurricane season, they would write a report, a paper for monthly weather review, a bunch of forecasters, and they would report on things like damage, fatalities, as well as each hurricanes like the actual physical characteristics of it. So we went back into those. They were a little bit more work, but I, on this paper, you'll see we have 4 undergrad students from FTCU that worked on this, and I had some others as well at times. So it's just been a really massive data science undertaking, but really, really in sort of fruitful, I think, and important.
Mike Kiniry
Do you implement any sort of AI tools or machine learning these days?
Dr. Jo Muller
So not for this paper because it just wasn't there. I am just amazed by what AI can do now. And so just in the last six months, really in the last three months, I've been able to do a lot more. So now I can throw in, I use Claude AI right now. And so I will throw in a bunch of tropical cyclone reports, and I'll ask it to, I'm mostly using it to validate right now. So like, what did you get for this storm? It'll like even create a table for me. So we always want, with this last publication, we had three sets of eyes on every storm. So we pulled the numbers, and then we went in with another set of eyes to validate it, and then a third set of eyes. Now with AI, I think life is going to be able to, we're going to be able to use it as another tool to make sure we're pulling the right numbers. So yes, it's highly useful. I use it to help me code. I use it for a lot of different things.
Mike Kiniry
I talked to, this is kind of off topic, but Dr. Leandro DeCastro from the Dendritic Institute. They're doing their AI Academy next month. There's one on water. There's one on water science. So that's what you're talking about.
Dr. Jo Muller
Yeah, no, he gave a talk for our seminar series this year on AI. And yeah, it's exciting to have the institute, the Dendritic Institute.
Mike Kiniry
You touched on this a little bit ago, but one of the things the paper mentions is that when it comes to freshwater flooding, social and economic factors play in. So economically depressed areas, may be more susceptible to this kind of danger. Is that accurate?
Dr. Jo Muller
Yes, it is. And it's a tough topic to talk about, I think. it's hard to communicate. I don't necessarily think people want to be told that they're vulnerable, especially vulnerable. I mean, I wouldn't, but we are seeing it in the science. There have been a couple of big studies. There was a study, two studies done after Hurricane Harvey, quite a few done after Hurricane Katrina. I think I have colleagues working on a post-Hellene study, but the mapping, when you map the actual peril itself, let's say that it's storm surge, let's take Ian for example, you take a flood model of what the storm surge was like, and then you look at where the fatalities are occurring. We're not seeing that those fatalities are necessarily in the areas with like the highest watermarks, for example, or the highest tide gauge marks. They're more associated with social vulnerabilities. So Katrina, the people that died from storm surge in Katrina, the two big factors were age and economic status. So essentially people that kind of didn't have the economic means to either prepare or evacuate. and then were older. So those are two big indexes for drowning, essentially. And it applies to rainfall as well. And they saw that after Hurricane Harvey, that people died in areas, again, it was age and also socioeconomics. And I think these are really important conversations to have with emergency managers, but also local county governments and, state and federal, how do we make sure we set up, kind of living environments where these folks are more protected and kind of have a sense of like what the actual hazard is? I think way before the hurricane, way before hurricane season. Yeah.
Mike Kiniry
The other thing that the paper also mentions is that There isn't, I mean, there is sort of a correlation, I'm sure, but that just because you aren't in a flood zone that requires FEMA flood plan insurance doesn't mean you might not have flooding that could be deadly.
Dr. Jo Muller
100%. And I have a colleague that did this work. And essentially, I think a lot of people think that if their mortgage company requires flood insurance, okay, and they're in a flood zone, then there's like, there's a hazard there, right? Like that's a concern. But if they're not asked to have that, they're like, oh, I'm cool then. Like, it's all good. And this was definitely the case with Helene. A lot of people that were not in flood zones completely flooded out. Most of them did not have insurance. You know, insurance actually, the uptake rates, especially for rain-driven flood insurance of incredibly low in areas like, the Asheville area. The rates here in Florida are a little higher. People tend to have insurance a bit more here, even if they're not necessarily in a flood zone. But these are all really like important communication pieces. I think people in Florida, there was a study also recently that showed that people in Florida are a little, there's like perception of risk and actual risk. The people in Florida tend to be a little, their perception tends to be a little closer to the actual risk. I think it's probably because we just get a lot of storms. But in areas where you have not as frequent storms, like the Asheville area, that gap becomes really large where people in that area don't even think about hurricane. They're like, oh, I live in Asheville. I'm way inland. I don't need to worry about this. And then, you have over 200 people die from a storm. And, this is, I mean, Helene now is our third most fatal storm in the continental US. This doesn't include, areas like Puerto Rico, where we've seen also really high fatalities. And that's That is the work that the students are doing now. So we're now expanding the data set to everything outside of the CONUS, the continental US.
Mike Kiniry
And I know there's a real economic issue with flood insurance in areas like that because it's the federal program and if there aren't a certain number of people, then they have to cost it out. And so, you know, the more people who sign up, the cheaper it gets, I guess.
Dr. Jo Muller
Yeah, It's not my area of expertise, especially like NFIP and private insurance especially, I think it can be, I mean, I consider myself probably having a more rounded understanding of all of this. I spend a lot of time with folks in industry. I do, I'm spending this summer in the UK working with industry reinsurers and groups that work in risk. And I don't understand it. So I can only imagine how overwhelming it is. And that was one of the other things that my colleague pointed out in their paper was that people just, it's very, like the understanding is not there and it can be difficult for people to even engage in it.
Mike Kiniry
So you have a publicly accessible database, but do you have to know how to get around GitHub to access it? It seems like it's probably for the data scientists at this point.
Dr. Jo Muller
I mean, I think that our database, GitHub, our database is like, it looks like Excel. Like, if you are familiar with Microsoft Excel, yeah. It's actually pretty, it's pretty clean. I think most folks would be able to go in there, but it's not meant for like a public-facing tool. So we are building an app right now. Actually, one of our great students in the software engineering program, Dylan Benzi, has been building this app with me for the last two years. So it will have damages as well normalized to 2024, 2025 as we continue on. So you can look at historical storms. So you could look at Donna, for example, and pull her up and it would tell you what the damage would be today, how many people died, what they died of. And it's actually, it's a public facing tool, like it's meant to be.
Mike Kiniry
A little more user friendly.
Dr. Jo Muller
It looks a lot prettier. It's got maps and you can see the track and all the cool stuff. So that hopefully is going to get released this summer.
Mike Kiniry
But you will be extending this database as years pass by from now on.
Dr. Jo Muller
Absolutely. It'll be a lot easier just to kind of update it by each year. And then we are moved, we've moved into the Caribbean and Central America and we're also tracking Canadian fatalities. So that's what the students are working on. this summer and next semester. So we're hoping to have not just a continental US database, but one for the entire Atlantic Basin. And I think the reason we've done this in STEPS is the fatalities and death tolls in the Caribbean are just exceptionally high. So, you know, some of these storms you'll see, you know, 1000 deaths rather than kind of like, 40 or 30 or 20. So I think it's made a lot of sense to try to be very careful and mindful of making sure that we're doing an okay job with the data. And I think on this particular project, we will probably be working a little closely, more closely with the National Hurricane Center.
Mike Kiniry
And correct me if I'm wrong, but the more severe the storm, the more chaotic it is afterwards and the harder it is to get good data. Yes.
Dr. Jo Muller
Yeah. I think it's, I think these storms where you have really high death tolls, it's like Katrina, for example, Maria, for example, it's kind of like, you only have so many coroners, so many doctors. So it's, the reporting gets less detailed. And so then it can be quite difficult to know whether the person, you know, really did die from blunt trauma or died from drowning. the detail may not be there. And that's an issue that we've already dealt with. I think with Katrina, we'll never really know what the real accurate count is for that storm. They've done a lot of post studies on it and they've done, I think, the best they probably can with the data they have from the coroner's reports. But, you know, I think that's hopefully an area that there'll be some, like, you know, improvements in the future. But, we all, we kind of know what it's like here in Florida after Ian being in a post-storm environment and we kind of all do the best we can. And so I think emergency managers do the best they can and car owners do the best they can. And yeah.
Mike Kiniry
We'll have to have you back to talk about the offshore course.
Dr. Jo Muller
Yeah, I'd love to.
Mike Kiniry
But that's all the time we have. Dr. Jo Muller is an eminent scholar and professor in the Whitaker Institute of STEM Education at FGCU. Thank you so much for your time, Dr. Muller.
Dr. Jo Muller
Thank you so much. I appreciate it.
Mike Kiniry
You can find a link to the paper and to the new data set on our website, wgcu.org slash GCL. You can find all of our past shows on our website as well and can subscribe to Gulf Coast Life wherever you find podcasts. Our show today was produced by yours truly with technical support from Jared Gonzalez. For now, thanks for listening. I'm Mike Kiniry. This is WGCU-FM Fort Myers 90.1, WMKO Marco Island 91.7 FM. We are NPR for Southwest Florida.
