Christopher Callahan, Jane Baldwin, Renzhi Jing, Marshall Burke, Noah S Diffenbaugh

Tropical cyclones (TCs) have direct economic impacts, destroying property and infrastructure. However, the sign and magnitude of their indirect impacts via longer-term changes in economic output remain unclear. Here we use data on TC winds and county-level income in the U.S. to quantify the long-term indirect impacts of TCs. We find a nonlinear response of income growth to TCs, where damages initially increase with storm size but diminish for the largest storms. We show that this is likely due to the compensating effect of disaster aid following strong storms. We find that TCs have reduced U.S. income by $33 trillion over 1980-2019, >25 times their direct losses, but estimate that losses would have been nearly 70% larger absent disaster aid. These findings highlight that disaster response can ameliorate indirect disaster impacts, but that to date such responses have only partially avoided large accumulating losses from TCs.