Verisk Companies Support Tornado Recovery Through Analytics

When a tornado touches down, property claims professionals immediately deploy to offer help and begin the recovery process for their policyholders. Three Verisk Analytics companies are helping the cause by providing tools and services that claims professionals use to offer immediate service and to learn lessons that can be applied to future storms.

By harnessing weather radar, satellite-based damage analysis, ultra-high-resolution aerial imagery, and ground surveys, Atmospheric and Environmental Research (AER), Xactware, and AIR Worldwide produce data, analytics, and modeling that give insurance professionals a deeper understanding of tornadoes and help to get storm victims back on their feet as soon as possible.

 AER, a provider of weather risk management solutions, uses advanced weather radar and satellite change detection to create near-real-time analysis available through the AER Respond service, which provides insurance carriers with high-resolution analysis of tornado damage locations. Insurance carriers can analyze the damage paths in a variety of geospatial platforms to fine-tune the potential impact on policyholders and to establish loss reserves.

"Quickly learning which policyholders have been affected during and after a tornado outbreak is an industrywide challenge that we've worked with carriers to address through the introduction of new weather analytics over the past year," says Kyle Beatty, senior vice president at AER. "By combining AER's weather radar and satellite damage analyses with the high-resolution aerial imagery and ground surveys from our Verisk sister companies, we've been able to understand the impacts of these events like never before and help the industry serve customers better and faster."

 Xactware, a provider of technology to the property insurance and restoration industries, captures property data that includes ultra-high-resolution aerial imagery. For example, in late 2012, the company captured data of Moore, Oklahoma. After the tornado, the company redeployed to the area to capture post-storm imagery and building data that gives property professionals insight about damaged and destroyed structures.

"The data we're extracting from these aerial images not only offers professionals a unique way to view structures before and after the tornado, it also gives them a way to immediately determine dimensions and see exterior structures and roofs as they were prior to the storm," says Jim Loveland, Xactware's president and CEO. "Ultimately, this means insurance and restoration professionals can get the data they need to handle losses before arriving on-site, which makes the rebuilding process easier and faster for everyone involved."

AIR Worldwide offers an online service called ALERT (AIR Loss Estimates in Real Time), which provides up-to-date information and loss estimates in real-time for major natural catastrophes worldwide. ALERT is exceedingly valuable to claims professionals, helping them prepare for the claims process by providing a full range of plausible impact scenarios. Claims departments can use catastrophe modeling to better allocate resources, identify where to deploy adjusters ahead of time, and formulate the most effective claim strategies. In the days following a catastrophic event, AIR also deploys damage survey teams to gather critical data that can be used to enhance the models.

Shortly after the Moore tornado, AIR Worldwide dispatched a team to survey the storm damage. The data that the team gathered will be used to enhance AIR's severe thunderstorm model, which provides the tools companies need to manage severe thunderstorm risk easily and proactively.

"We surveyed cross-sections perpendicular to the tornado path at several points along its track," says Scott Stransky, senior scientist at AIR Worldwide. "The data gathered from this event will go a long way toward enabling us to develop a new relationship between damage and distance from the center of a tornado, which will ultimately help inform our severe thunderstorm model update anticipated for release in 2014."