Insurers are able to create hurricane tracksand parameters themselves and estimate thedamage to their exposures in a given region witha new release from Karen Clark & Company (KCC). Karen Clark, president and CEO of KCC, says WindfieldBuilderdiffers from solutions offered by traditional catastrophe modelersbecause of the level of control and customization that it offers toinsurers. She says that in a traditional model, the modelers provideevent catalogues, and insurers license the models to gain access tothose predetermined events. "You can't change the eventsor see how different storm parameters would change yourlosses," she says. In the case of a real-time event, such as Superstorm Sandy,Clark says modelers will send insurers prepackaged informationfor estimating the losses. With WindfieldBuilder, Clark says users can create cataloguesthemselves. In the case of Sandy, she says, users would have beenable to directly download the storm's track from the NationalHurricane Center, and then create wind speedsbylocation to calculate losses. She says insurers can also build their own storm tracks usingWindfieldBuilder and see the impact across risks in a given area.For example, a board or CEO could use the tool to see the impact ofa Category 5 storm making landfall anywhere along thecoast in the Northeast. Users can also select other storm features such as slow,medium, or fast filling—indicating the rate at which the hurricanewinds dissipate over land. "All storms lose energy as they travel over land, but the rateat which that occurs varies widely from storm to storm," says GlenDaraskevich, senior vice president, KCC, in a statement. "Forexample, Hurricane Ike was an outlier in how slowly it dissipatedafter landfall. WindfieldBuilder shows how historical hurricaneshave weakened over land and enables companies to directly test howdifferent filling rates impact their portfolio losses." Clark also says the tool can be useful in gauging the impactof climate change."So if you believe climatechange will cause hurricane wind speeds toincrease," she says, "you can take storms and assume wind speedswill be 5 percent higher, for example," and run it through a givenrisk portfolio.