Estimating Pluvial Depth–Damage Functions for Areas within the United States Using Historical Claims Data

Flooding has been the most costly natural disaster over the last 2 decades within the US. Therefore, recent research has focused on more accurately predicting economic losses from flooding to aid decision makers and mitigate economic exposure. For this, depth–damage functions have commonly been employed to predict the relative or absolute damage to buildings caused by different magnitudes of flooding. Although depth–damage functions, such as those adopted by the US Army Corps of Engineers, are widely available for fluvial and coastal flooding, less work has been done to develop functions for pluvial-induced flooding. Here, we use a database containing 13.5 million claims to develop pluvial depth–damage functions. For this, recently released flood hazard data are utilized to identify claims within the database that are likely related to pluvial flooding. We employed two types of regression models to fit the depth–damage functions. Secondarily, we developed an automated valuation model (AVM) to estimate building values across the state of New Jersey. These building values were then combined with flood hazard layers in order to apply the depth–damage functions and compute an aggregate annualized loss for New Jersey. The results indicated moderate agreement between the observed damage within the state of New Jersey and that computed by applying the study-developed depth–damage curves to buildings within the state using pluvial flood hazard layers. It is anticipated that the depth–damage functions developed by this research will aid future work in more accurately quantifying the economic risks associated with flooding across the US.