How storms affect fishers’ decisions about going to sea

Abstract

Abstract Fishermen are known to try to avoid fishing in stormy weather, as storms pose a physical threat to fishers, their vessels, and their gear. In this article, a dataset and methods are developed to investigate the degree to which fishers avoid storms, estimate storm aversion parameters, and explore how this response varies across vessel characteristics and across regions of the United States. The data consist of vessel-level trip-taking decisions from six federal fisheries across the United States combined with marine storm warning data from the National Weather Service. The estimates of storm aversion can be used to parameterize predictive models. Fishers’ aversion to storms decreases with increasing vessel size and increases with the severity of the storm warning. This information contributes to our understanding of the risk-to-revenue trade-off that fishers evaluate every time they consider going to sea, and of the propensity of fishers to take adaptive actions to avoid facing additional physical risk.