Windstorms are among the most impacting natural hazards affecting Western and Central Europe. Information on the associated impacts and losses are essential for risk assessment and the development of adaptation and mitigation strategies. In this study, we compare reported and estimated windstorm losses from five datasets belonging to three categories: Indices combining meteorological and insurance aspects, natural hazard databases, and loss reports from insurance companies. We analyse the similarities and differences between the datasets in terms of reported events, the number of storms per dataset and the ranking of specific storm events for the period October 1999 to March 2022 across 21 European countries. A total of 94 individual windstorms were documented. Only 11 of them were reported in all five datasets, while the large majority (roughly 60%) was solely recorded in single datasets. Results show that the total number of storms is different in the various datasets, although for the meteorological indices such number is fixed a priori. Additionally, the datasets often disagree on the storm frequency per winter season. Moreover, the ranking of storms based on reported/estimated losses varies in the datasets. However, these differences are reduced when the ranking is calculated relative to storm events that are common in the various datasets. The results generally hold for losses aggregated at European and at country level. Overall, the datasets provide different views on windstorm impacts. Thus, to avoid misleading conclusions, we use no dataset as “ground truth” but treat all of them as equal. We suggest that these different views can be used to test which features are relevant for calibrating windstorm models in specific regions. Furthermore, it could enable users to assign an uncertainty range to windstorm losses. We conclude that a combination of different datasets is crucial to obtain a representative picture of windstorm associated impacts.

中文翻译：

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欧洲的风暴损失 – 从损害数据集中获得什么

风暴是影响西欧和中欧的最严重的自然灾害之一。有关相关影响和损失的信息对于风险评估以及适应和缓解战略的制定至关重要。在本研究中，我们比较了属于三类的五个数据集的报告和估计的风暴损失：气象和保险方面的指数、自然灾害数据库和保险公司的损失报告。我们分析了 21 个欧洲国家报告的事件、每个数据集的风暴数量以及 1999 年 10 月至 2022 年 3 月期间特定风暴事件排名方面数据集之间的异同。总共记录了 94 场单独的风暴。所有五个数据集中仅报告了其中的 11 个，而绝大多数（约 60%）仅记录在单个数据集中。结果表明，各个数据集中的风暴总数不同，尽管对于气象指数来说，该数量是先验固定的。此外，数据集通常对每个冬季的风暴频率不一致。此外，数据集中基于报告/估计损失的风暴排名也有所不同。然而，当相对于各种数据集中常见的风暴事件计算排名时，这些差异就会减少。结果通常适用于欧洲和国家层面的总损失。总体而言，数据集提供了关于风暴影响的不同观点。因此，为了避免误导性的结论，我们不使用数据集作为“基本事实”，而是平等地对待所有数据集。我们建议这些不同的视图可用于测试哪些特征与校准特定区域的风暴模型相关。此外，它还可以让用户为风暴损失分配一个不确定性范围。我们的结论是，不同数据集的组合对于获得风暴相关影响的代表性图片至关重要。