AIR Worldwide has incorporated a climate-change analysis tool into its Catastrophe Risk Engineering (CRE) program, adding the reality of increasingly volatile weather into risk scenarios that may impact companies and emergency services.
The new tool, named Real-Time Climate Risk Analytics, plays out a variety of simulated storm scenarios, including those more intense than have been historically recorded–forecasting their track, intensity, damage, and loss analysis on an organization's assets and business continuity as the event evolves.
"AIR developed Real-Time Climate Risk Analytics in direct response to a need expressed by our clients for a customizable solution that quantifies the risk of storm activity prior to landfall and assesses what the resulting physical and financial impacts could be to their properties," says Peter Dailey, vice president and director of atmospheric science at AIR Worldwide.
He continued, "By combining Real-Time Climate Risk Analytics with AIR's Catastrophe Risk Engineering (CRE) services, AIR provides an end-to-end solution, from site-specific analysis for modeling the vulnerabilities of assets to real-time climate risk services that help risk managers and agencies better prepare for natural catastrophes. This is a significant improvement over other solutions that look only at real-time hazard data. Decisions can now be made based on the physical and financial risk to the assets under consideration."
The core technology of the model is the web-based application ClimateCast, which tracks active tropical cyclones in the Atlantic basin and their potential for producing losses to onshore and offshore locations in the U.S. and the Gulf of Mexico. It is updated four times daily based on data from the National Hurricane Center (NHC) and other major meteorological organizations.
It is updated four times daily based on data from the National Hurricane Center (NHC) and other major meteorological organizations. The constant input of data can aid in-the-moment decision making days before a storm hits, since uncertainty about possible wind speeds by location only begins to fall away close to landfall.
"The AIR team also conducts its own research across the full climate spectrum — from local climate factors influencing individual events in real time to global factors influencing the risk over several years," said Dailey. "Finally, AIR's catastrophe loss models and site-specific engineering are able to translate climate-induced changes into easy-to-understand loss metrics."
Dailey says the product is aimed at large retailers with a chain of similar sites in various regions, which will benefit from knowing how an event will affect business flow if one or more locations is crippled, as well as high-value sites such as industrial complexes that house concentrates its corporate campuses and refineries in one space.
There is also growing nonprofit interest in catastrophe modeling, he says: "We have had a lot of interest expressed to us about our climate change modeling software, especially in public risk services. This is an emerging market for us."
© Arc, All Rights Reserved. Request academic re-use from www.copyright.com. All other uses, submit a request to TMSalesOperations@arc-network.com. For more information visit Asset & Logo Licensing.