Catastrophe risk modeling firm AIR Worldwide (AIR) has introduced new inland flood model for Germany that offers a fully probabilistic approach for determining the likelihood of flood losses from all types of storms.
AIR said, the new inland flood model provides insurers and reinsurers a tool for managing inland flood risk, allowing companies to make informed underwriting decisions, to monitor and quantify aggregate concentrations of flood risk across their portfolios, and to assess the potential impact of less frequent but large loss events.
The model includes on-floodplain flooding, which covers a river network extending more than 160,000 kilometers and comprising more than 30,000 stream links, and off-floodplain flooding, which is modeled according to the specifics of more than 35,000 small catchments (drainage areas) in Germany.
The AIR Inland Flood Model for Germany is currently available in Version 13.0 of the CLASIC/2 and CATRADER catastrophe risk management systems.
AIR Worldwide senior vice president of research and modeling Jayanta Guin said to meet the challenge of capturing both large-scale and small-scale precipitation patterns, AIR has adopted the approach of coupling Global Climate Model (GCM) with a detailed Numerical Weather Prediction (NWP) model.
Furthermore, the NWP model provides all the necessary input — liquid and frozen precipitation, surface wind, surface temperature, and solar radiation — to account for the impact of snowmelt and soil moisture conditions, both important contributors to flood risk.