AIR Worldwide improves hurricane and inland flood models for US

Catastrophe risk modeling firm AIR Worldwide has enhanced its hurricane and inland flood models for the US to help insurers and reinsurers enhance their risk management for all property lines of business.

The update for the hurricane model features a new module for precipitation-induced flood risk, while the flood model includes enhancements to both hazard and vulnerability, including a new, higher-resolution digital terrain model.

AIR said the extreme precipitation events, such as hurricane Harvey and Florence, in the past decade have highlighted 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 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.”

Cagdas Kafali, senior vice president, research, AIR Worldwide, added: “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. 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.”