CoreLogic updated its Risk Quantification and Engineering tool amid brutal California wildfires to include U.S. Wildfire and U.S. Severe Convective Storm models to support the mortgage and insurance industries in better assessing natural disaster risk.
The company also modified its U.S. Inland Flood model to represent localized property characteristics and more efficiently treat flash flooding.
"Historically, property insurers have been unable to accurately analyze the true impact of wildfire, flood and severe convective storm damages because they lacked consistent and complete data. For all three of these perils the historical record has critical limitations and challenges. We have overcome this with some very innovative modeling approaches," Staci Wellentin, executive product management for insurance and spatial solutions at CoreLogic, said in a press release.
"These new probabilistic wildfire and severe convective storm models, as well as the updates to the inland flood model, also use the breadth of CoreLogic property and valuations data, and this provides greater accuracy of risk quantification for customers, and that means better protection for families and businesses against the damages from natural catastrophes," she added.
The U.S. Wildfire Model will replace CoreLogic's existing California Wildfire Model so lenders and insurers can better quantify risk potential based on how a fire burns, spreads and subsides, along with the durability of the structures battling the fires. The new model takes burn and smoke damage into account, while also calculating for the probability of 3.5 million events based on data across the full spectrum of risk, from individual risk underwriting through portfolio risk management, according to CoreLogic.
The company's U.S. Severe Convective Storm Model accounts for 4 million probabilistic events by incorporating updated science, research and post-event and historical datasets to assess the intricacies of tornadoes, hail and straight-lined winds and their real-time effects on properties and automobiles in the lower 48 states.
The U.S. Inland Flood Model is updated with modifications to flash flooding in specific regions and revised treatment of contents in buildings.
The new updates can be delivered through application program interface integration, on-premise, via a cloud or professional services to make the tools more readily available to lenders and insurers.
The U.S. Wildfire Model is concentrated to 14 states selected for their high risk of wildfires and subsequent insurance losses: Arizona, California, Colorado, Florida, Idaho, Montana, New Mexico, Nevada, Oklahoma, Oregon, Texas, Utah, Washington and Wyoming.
