Driving Awareness and Action to the Insurance Industry through an Asset Management Dashboard and Alerting System

The cost of weather disasters in the United States has increased from an average of $9 billion per year in the 1980s to about $36 billion per year in the 2000s according to a recent study from Munich Re, the world's largest reinsurance firm. The increasing cost and number of catastrophic events, coupled with improving detection and forecast skill of weather peril, is driving the Property and Casualty (P&C) Insurance industry to respond to these events in an increasingly proactive way. The end result for policyholders is superior service when it's critically needed.

As the leading provider of weather visualization tools to the broadcast, aviation, and energy industries, WSI is well positioned to leverage its vast experience of weather data visualization and alerting through multiple channels to drive action. These elements are applied in an asset dashboard alerting system specifically designed to provide real-time spatial analytics and decision support to catastrophe teams within the P&C industry. Industry partners have and are providing WSI's team of meteorologists, application developers, and human factors engineers the business intelligence that provides actionable and relevant alerting so the insurer can deploy money and resources to the right people and the right locations faster.

The presentation provides an example of how an insurer uses these tools to respond to hail storms. We examine how new dual polarization technology alerts catastrophe teams to the potential of debris lofted from tornadoes, so that response times can be faster, no matter the time of day or location of those teams. We also briefly discuss the role of ground-truth integration with remotely sensed data and the potential that offers insurers in the years to come.