WTW, an advisory, broking, and solutions company, has announced the continuation of its long-standing collaboration with the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), alongside NASA’s Disasters Program and the NASA Langley Research Center.
The partnership will focus on advancing the understanding and modelling of hail risk, leveraging more than a decade of joint efforts.
The latest phase of this collaboration will utilise state-of-the-art datasets and research to tackle the evolving challenges of hailstorms, particularly in light of climate change.
Hailstorms are one of the most financially damaging weather events, especially in Europe, where recent years have seen substantial insured losses.
As climate change continues to impact hail formation, the complexities surrounding this peril have increased. Understanding how factors like hailstorm frequency, intensity, and geographical distribution are shifting has become a critical priority for both re/insurers and researchers.
This new phase of the collaboration also builds on the success of the original Willis European hail model—the first stochastic hail model to cover all of Europe. Since its introduction in 2014, the model has played a vital role in hail risk estimation and pricing and has been widely adopted by re/insurers across the region.
The updated version of the Willis European hail model will feature significant improvements, including an enhanced time series of overshooting cloud top detections from NASA satellites, which act as indicators of severe weather and hailstorm activity.
A new model setup will also be introduced for more accurate hail hazard assessment. In addition, the research will investigate the impact of climate factors on hailstorm characteristics, such as hailstone size, frequency, and damage potential.
By combining advanced simulations, high-resolution satellite data, and detailed trend analysis of environmental conditions, the collaboration aims to offer valuable insights into the evolving spatial and temporal distribution of hail risks across Europe. This work will enable the re/insurance industry to better anticipate and manage hail-related risks in the face of an increasingly volatile climate.
“Hailstorms are a growing concern for the re/insurance industry, particularly as climate change introduces new uncertainties around their behaviour,” said Daniel Bannister, Weather & Climate Risks Research Lead at WTW. “Our continued collaboration with KIT and NASA ensures we remain at the forefront of scientific research, enabling us to provide re/insurers with the insights they need to respond to this complex peril.”
“Our collaboration with WTW and NASA allows us to integrate cutting-edge science and innovative methods into business and economic sectors, impacting the public at large,” commented Professor Michael Kunz, leader of the Atmospheric Risks working group at KIT. “It’s crucial to deepen our understanding of how climate change influences hail formation and how this, in turn, translates into risk.”
“With state-of-the-art identification techniques we can quantify severe storm distribution and frequency with an exceptional level of consistency and persistence that’s only granted by satellite measurements,” added Benjamin Scarino, a Research Scientist at NASA’s Langley Research Centre.
“Long-term satellite data records allow us to provide the re/insurance industry, project partners, and the research community with valuable insights into severe storm activity and risk.”
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