Identification of extreme weather events and impacts of the disasters in Brazil (2409.16309v1)

Abstract: An important consequence of human-induced climate change emerges through extreme weather events. The impact of extreme weather events is quantified in some parts of the globe, but it remains underestimated in several countries. In this work we first quantify the extreme temperature and precipitation events in Brazil using data from the Brazilian Institute of Meteorology, which includes 634 meteorological stations that have worked intermittently since 1961. We show that the anomaly in temperature has increased by more than 1{\deg}C in the last 60 years and that extreme events are heterogeneously distributed in the country. In terms of precipitation, our analyses show that it is getting drier in the Northwest region of Brazil while excessive precipitation events are increasing in the South, in agreement with previous works. We then use data from S2iD, an official database that registers disasters in Brazil to estimate their impact in terms of human damage and financial costs in the last ten years. The analysis shows that the drought extreme events are the most expensive, several of them reaching a cost of over a billion USD. Although we are not able to attribute the natural disasters registered in one database to the extreme weather events identified using the meteorological data, we discuss the possible correlations between them. Finally, we present a proposal of using extreme value theory to estimate the probability of having severe extreme events of precipitation in locations where there are already some natural disasters.