AIR Worldwide Releases Updated Hurricane and Inland Flood Models for the United States
July 14 2020 - 6:07AM
Catastrophe risk modeling firm AIR Worldwide (AIR) announced today
that it has updated its Hurricane and Inland Flood Models for the
United States. The update for the hurricane model features a new
module for precipitation-induced flood risk, while the flood model
includes major enhancements to both hazard and vulnerability,
including a new, higher-resolution digital terrain model. Taken
together, the updates to these models will help insurers and
reinsurers enhance their risk management and have a unified and
comprehensive view of flood risk across the United States and for
all property lines of business. AIR Worldwide is a Verisk
(Nasdaq:VRSK) business.
The 2017 and 2018 Atlantic hurricane seasons set
records for precipitation and left lasting impacts from the severe
flooding brought on by intense storms. In addition to non-tropical
extreme precipitation events, stalling tropical systems have
increased in frequency and severity over the past century. In
August 2017 Hurricane Harvey flooded Texas with record-breaking
rainfall, and in September 2018 Hurricane Florence brought severe
flooding to the Carolinas. The extreme precipitation events in the
past decade have brought to the forefront the importance of
modeling flood risk outside floodplains.
“By leveraging innovative methodologies that
realistically simulate rainfall patterns of tropical cyclones using
advanced machine learning techniques, we updated the hurricane
model to include the explicit and probabilistic modeling of
precipitation-induced flooding associated with hurricanes,” said
Dr. Boyko Dodov, vice president, research, AIR Worldwide.
“Together, these models provide a unified view of flood risk from
all sources—tropical and non-tropical precipitation on- and-off the
floodplains and coastal storm surge—across the contiguous United
States.”
The updated AIR Inland Flood Model incorporates
a physically-based 2-dimensional (2D) shallow water wave model to
simulate off-plain flood risk over the contiguous U.S. By more
accurately modeling all surface water flooding during an event,
modeling both the flow from rivers onto land and the flooding over
areas away from rivers, the updated Inland Flood Model provides a
complete view of U.S. inland flood risk, both on and off the
floodplains.
In addition, the model leverages several loss
data sets for model loss validation. Close to USD 70 billion of
actual National Flood Insurance Programs (NFIP) loss data were used
in validating the model, taken from over four decades, from 1978
through 2018. To evaluate non-residential losses, the model relies
on more than a decade of private market insured loss data assets
from Verisk businesses Xactware® and PCS®, as well as company
claims data.
Engineers at AIR validated each component of the
model to ensure the most robust results. For validating
precipitation-induced flooding damage functions vast amounts of
data was collected from such sources as the U.S. Federal Emergency
Management Administration (FEMA), the Federal Insurance and
Mitigation Administration (FIMA), and the U.S. Army Corps of
Engineers (USACE).
The AIR Hurricane and Inland Flood Models for
the U.S. employ the same, component-level vulnerability framework
to quantify losses from inland flooding and hurricane precipitation
events. The same primary and secondary risk features are available
and applied for both of the models. In the case that information
about secondary features are not available, AIR offers the first
market-wide solution to account for community-level flood
regulations, including sound first-floor height assumptions. In
addition, the framework explicitly models large industrial
facilities, accounting for different types of mitigation features,
and other specialty lines.
“When the AIR Hurricane and the Inland Flood
Models for the U.S. are used in combination, they provide one
unified view of precipitation hazard,” said Dr. Cagdas Kafali,
senior vice president, research, AIR Worldwide. “These
high-resolution, physically-based catastrophe models can simulate
both tropical and non-tropical precipitation realistically,
allowing insurers to expand into new markets profitably and cover
the flood insurance gap.”
The AIR Hurricane and AIR Inland Flood Models
for the United States are available in the 2020 releases of
Touchstone® and Touchstone Re catastrophe risk management
systems.
About AIR WorldwideAIR
Worldwide (AIR) provides risk modeling solutions that make
individuals, businesses, and society more resilient to extreme
events. In 1987, AIR Worldwide founded the catastrophe modeling
industry and today models the risk from natural catastrophes,
terrorism, pandemics, casualty catastrophes, and cyber incidents.
Insurance, reinsurance, financial, corporate, and government
clients rely on AIR’s advanced science, software, and consulting
services for catastrophe risk management, insurance-linked
securities, site-specific engineering analyses, and agricultural
risk management. AIR Worldwide, a Verisk (Nasdaq:VRSK) business, is
headquartered in Boston, with additional offices in North America,
Europe, and Asia. For more information, please visit
www.air-worldwide.com. For more information about Verisk, a leading
data analytics provider serving customers in insurance, energy and
specialized markets, and financial services, please
visit www.verisk.com
For more information, contact:Kevin LongAIR
Worldwide617-267-6645klong@air-worldwide.com
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