The historic reality of the cyclonic variability in French Antilles, 1635–2007

Abstract. Facing climate change and increasing costs of natural disasters, the exposure evolution analysis requires having a long-term knowledge of the impacts of extreme events. By associating historical and modeling approaches, we aim to build a long term chronology of natural disaster severity and damages. To highlight this new methodology, the overseas departments of French Antilles have been chosen. These territories are strongly exposed to natural disasters, particularly hurricanes. The search with historical archives made it possible to reconstruct, for the first time, the chronology and severity of hurricanes since the 17th century. During the 20th century, a significative increase in the number of cyclones has occurred after the 1950s. The analysis of a longer historical period (since the 1630s) allows us to temperate this idea by showing intensive cyclonic period in the past centuries.