The insurance industry requires a better understanding of the drivers behind the variability in the frequency and/or severity of Europe’s droughts and other major weather events, how they are potentially interlinked, and the resulting insurance claims.

To tackle this, the insurance industry must work more closely together with the academic sector to improve physical process understanding and risk modelling. Researchers can continue to support the insurance sector by further developing current food, hydrological and atmospheric model methodologies, supporting end-user validation of models, and improving the accuracy of results through better input data.

The insurance industry also requires a clearer, consolidated understanding of the scientific processes, such as clustering and correlations, that drive extreme weather events.

Key Research Questions

To drive forward better understanding of Hydrological and Atmospheric Risk, we have put together a series of questions that we believe need answering. These are as follows:

• Can we improve very local forecasting for floods,storms, drought and heatwave forecasting?
• One of the main determinants of flood risk, and a key source of uncertainty in risk modelling, is the location of flood defences, their standard of protection, and their quality/tolerance. Can we improve this data set?
• Are tail event footprints realistic in terms of their spatial extent and severity/flood depths?
• Can we develop a better understanding of the natural variability mechanisms and their relation to European windstorms?
• Do winters that possess multiple damaging windstorms also contain loss-making flood events?
• How well correlated are wind and flood hazards not just in the tail but at shorter return periods?
• Does the suggested future atmospheric/oceanic warming extend the crossover region between hurricanes and re-intensify systems further NE into the Atlantic?
• Rapid development of European storms makes it difficult to increase the time element of warnings beforehand: can this be improved?

If you are an academic and believe you can help fulfil or progress the questions above, or if you are an insurer wishing to expand or share your own expertise on the topic, please get in contact with us to see how you can help.