A recent study by a group of Chinese scientists mapped the economic sector loss brought by influential tropical cyclones (ITCs) in China in the last three decades.

The study, after calculation and analysis on multiple reference databases and socio-economic data, revealed ITCs loss for major economic sectors such as agriculture, industry, construction, transport, and business & others.

Industrial sector was proved to be the biggest victim of ITCs, accounting for 37 percent of the total ITCs loss, according to the study.

"High values were primarily distributed in the urban agglomerations of the Pearl River and Yangtze River deltas and along the southeastern coast, with over 1 billion CNY per year," said SU Buda, a researcher from the Xinjiang Institute of Ecology and Geography (XIEG) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

A tropical cyclone is a rapidly rotating storm system characterized by a low-pressure center, a closed low-level atmospheric circulation, strong winds, and a spiral arrangement of thunderstorms that produce heavy rain. In China, ITCs are defined as those that cause significant national economic loss.

The industrial sector had the highest growth rate of loss from ITCs, while the construction sector showed the lowest. There was a rising tendency for ITCs loss in all economic sectors except agriculture, according to the study.

The ITCs track was migrating northward, causing increasing severe loss to all economic sectors in northern China, SU said.

Rainfall was proved to be more positively correlated with loss from tropical cyclones than wind speed, and the industrial sector showed the largest correlation, the study showed.

Results of the study were published in Global and Planetary Change with the title "Economic sector loss from influential tropical cyclones and relationship to associated rainfall and wind speed in China".