A wind damage prediction tool has been launched to provide local damage forecasts for European windstorms. This follows Windstorm Erwin, which hit Northern Europe from January 7-9 last year, causing $1.5bn of damage, mainly in Denmark, Sweden and the UK.
The interactive, web-based service, called EuroTempest, has been developed by insurers, reinsurers, loss modellers and extreme weather forecasting experts from Benfield, Royal & SunAlliance, GE Insurance Solutions and the Meteorological Hazards & Seasonal Forecasting research team from the Benfield Hazard Research Centre at University College London.
European windstorms are severe extra-tropical cyclones which usually form in the North Atlantic during winter and track towards northwest Europe. After US hurricanes, European winter windstorms rank as the next most expensive cause of global insured losses, with windstorms Daria (1990), Lothar (1999), Vivian (1990) and the October 1987 storm ranking 7th, 8th, 12th and 13th on the list of most costly global insurance losses since 1970, according to Swiss Re.
Professor Mark Saunders, Technical Director of EuroTempest and Head of Meteorological Hazards & Seasonal Forecasting at Benfield Hazard Research Centre said that EuroTempest acts as a warning service, providing insurers and reinsurers with advance forecasts up to five days before a windstorm to help them to predict potential wind damage and windstorm losses down to postcode level.
EuroTempest covers seven European countries: the UK, Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Ireland, and the Netherlands, which are among those most frequently affected by windstorm losses. It also includes warnings for the severity and timing of high windspeeds in all other European countries, using windspeed and pressure forecasts from the UK Met Office's numerical weather prediction models, combined with in-house research and modelling.
