United States economic sensitivity to weather variability

Using 24 years of economic data and weather observations, we developed quantitative models of the relationship between state-level sectoral economic output and weather variability for the 11 nongovernmental sectors of the U.S. economy; we used temperature and precipitation measures as proxies for all weather impacts.

All 11 sectors are found to have statistically significant sensitivity to weather variability. We then held economic inputs constant and estimated economic output in the 11 estimated sector models, varying only weather inputs using 70 years of historical weather observations. We find that U.S. economic output varies by up to $485 billion a year of 2008 gross domestic product—about 3.4%—owing to weather variability.