Identification

Title

United States economic sensitivity to weather variability

Abstract

To estimate the economic effects of weather variability in the United States, we define and measure weather sensitivity as the variability in economic output attributable to weather variability, accounting for changes in technology and changes in levels of economic inputs (i.e., capital, labor, and energy). Using 24 years of economic data and weather observations, we developed quantitative models of the relationship between state-level sectoral economic output and weather variability for the 11 nongovernmental sectors of the U.S. economy; we used temperature and precipitation measures as proxies for all weather impacts. All 11 sectors are found to have statistically significant sensitivity to weather variability. We then held economic inputs constant and estimated economic output in the 11 estimated sector models, varying only weather inputs using 70 years of historical weather observations. We find that U.S. economic output varies by up to $485 billion a year of 2008 gross domestic productâ€”about 3.4%â€”owing to weather variability. We identify U.S. states more sensitive to weather variability and rank the sectors by their degree of weather sensitivity. We discuss how this work illustrates a valid approach to measuring the economic impact of weather variability, gives baseline information and methods for more detailed studies of the sensitivity of each sector to weather variability, and lays the groundwork for assessing the value of current or improved weather forecast information given the economic impacts of weather variability.

Resource type

document

Resource locator

Unique resource identifier

code

http://n2t.net/ark:/85065/d7th8p02

codeSpace

Dataset language

eng

Spatial reference system

code identifying the spatial reference system

Classification of spatial data and services

Topic category

geoscientificInformation

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keyword value

Text

originating controlled vocabulary

title

Resource Type

reference date

date type

publication

effective date

2016-01-01T00:00:00Z

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Temporal reference

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End position

Dataset reference date

date type

publication

effective date

2011-06-01T00:00:00Z

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Use constraints

Copyright 2010 American Meteorological Society (AMS). Permission to use figures, tables, and brief excerpts from this work in scientific and educational works is hereby granted provided that the source is acknowledged. Any use of material in this work that is determined to be "fair use" under Section 107 or that satisfies the conditions specified in Section 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law (17 USC, as revised by P.L. 94-553) does not require the Society's permission. Republication, systematic reproduction, posting in electronic form on servers, or other uses of this material, except as exempted by the above statements, requires written permission or license from the AMS. Additional details are provided in the AMS Copyright Policies, available from the AMS at 617-227-2425 or amspubs@ametsoc.org. Permission to place a copy of this work on this server has been provided by the AMS. The AMS does not guarantee that the copy provided here is an accurate copy of the published work.

Limitations on public access

None

Responsible organisations

Responsible party

contact position

OpenSky Support

organisation name

UCAR/NCAR - Library

full postal address

PO Box 3000

Boulder

80307-3000

email address

opensky@ucar.edu

web address

http://opensky.ucar.edu/

name: homepage

responsible party role

pointOfContact

Metadata on metadata

Metadata point of contact