Puerto Rico & USVI
This dashboard accompanies Modeling Population Vulnerabilities to Climate Change-Driven Hurricanes and Tropical Storms in the North Atlantic Basin (Mullins & Uelmen, manuscript in review). It maps modeled mortality risk from tropical cyclones for 20,051 U.S. census tracts across 21 Atlantic and Gulf coast states and territories, including Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands, under six storm-intensity scenarios (Tropical Storm and Saffir–Simpson Categories 1–5).
Hurricanes and tropical storms are among the deadliest and costliest disasters in the United States, and climate change is expected to make the strongest storms more frequent. Combining records from 24 of the most damaging storms to strike the U.S., Puerto Rico, and the USVI since 1992 with detailed demographic information for communities within 25 miles of the coast, we measured each storm's rainfall, wind, and flooding and used boosted-tree machine-learning models to estimate mortality risk for every census block. Risk rises with storm severity and concentrates in densely populated coastal cities — notably in Puerto Rico, Louisiana, Florida, and the Mid-Atlantic — and in low-lying inlets, peninsulas, and sounds.
Block-level estimates are aggregated here to census tracts; the mapped value is the tract-mean mortality per 100,000 residents. Risk classes (Very Low → Very High) are quintiles computed within each scenario, so class boundaries differ between scenarios — check the legend after switching. Click any tract for its values across all six scenarios; the Share button copies a link restoring your current view. The aim is practical: helping residents, planners, and emergency managers explore local risk and prepare — from evacuation planning to infrastructure hardening and public-health communication.
Data use & citation. These data are free to use. Please cite the dataset (deposit at the MINDS@UW repository is under review — citation forthcoming) and the accompanying manuscript (about to undergo peer review). This page will be updated with full citations when available.
Contact. Questions and media inquiries: Johnny Uelmen — uelmen@wisc.edu.
Produced by the Uelmen Disease Ecology Lab, University of Wisconsin–Madison. Data & analysis: Shaelyn Mullins. Source data: uelmen.sharedigm.com/data/hurricane.