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Abstract
The occurrence of extreme weather and climate events has increased in recent decades. This increasing frequency has adversely impacted economic and health outcomes, leading to an increasingly urgent need to study climate extremes. The National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI) created the Climate Extremes Index (CEI) in 1996 to quantify climate extremes. In this thesis, the CEI is improved by recalculating it using Z-scores instead of the prior approach of using 10th and 90th percentiles. This provided a more accurate method of quantifying climate extremes while calculating the CEI on a climate division basis. CEI values were then combined with recalculated Social Vulnerability Index (SVI) values to create a new Extremes Vulnerability Index (EVI) that calculates climate extremes vulnerability in the United States. The information contained in the EVI can be used by policymakers to implement policies and changes in infrastructure that mitigate risk in vulnerable climate divisions.