Category Archives: tornado

Understanding the Impact… Moore, OK Tornado

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To help businesses respond to the unfortunate tragedy experienced in Moore, Oklahoma on the afternoon of May 20, Weather Decision Technologies (WDT - http://www.weatherops.com/) has provided a preliminary footprint of the EF4 tornado free of charge and without restriction. SpatialKey has distributed this data to its insurance clients via the Data Mart for efficient impact analysis and mobilization of response efforts.

In the wake of this event, insurer’s need to gain a complete understanding of their potential exposure and begin to deploy claims personnel to assist and protect their insureds.

Visualize the impact in SpatialKey

With the footprint from WDT and analytics from SpatialKey, you can quickly quantify your exposure just 24 hours after the storm. SpatialKey has provided ready access to this footprint within the Data Mart, under the WDT provider section. Just pick the “Moore Oklahoma F4 Tornado – May 20th 2013″ file to use in your analysis.

 

Analyze your data by joining the tornado swath with your exposure.

Let’s set up a join between your exposure dataset and the tornado swath in order to begin evaluating loss potential and response scenarios within a SpatialKey Map Analyst dashboard. Select to “Use the Point Locations” for the join – this will take the latitude and longitude coordinates from your geocoded dataset and place them in the context of the storm footprint.

After the join completes, view your exposure and the Moore Tornado in SpatialKey Map Analyst using the joined fields as filters to narrow down the exposed risks. For a refresher on how to use joined fields as filters, check out this article.

Buffer around the tornado track

There are not too many locations in the direct path of the tornado for my dataset, but there are likely damages in close proximity to the path. To understand the impact within 5 miles of the swath, you can apply a buffer, which will include locations within that buffer in your analysis.

You can add analytic pods to understand the composition of those exposures, what claims personnel you may have responding already, and which business operations are most impacted by insured losses.

Response time is critical… with SpatialKey and the tornado footprint from WDT, you are one step closer to understanding your exposure and to mobilizing your response to this event. We hope this solution will assist businesses in expediting the delivery of aid and relief to those impacted by this tragic event.

The Severe Storms app is ready for its first full severe storm season!

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Released last September, the Severe Storms app enables insurers to understand loss potential associated with live and historical U.S. tornado, hail, and straight-line wind events. To illustrate key features and workflow of the Severe Storms application, let’s review its capabilities in the context of the April 19 storm outbreak in the Tulsa, OK area.

SpatialKey Severe Storms integrates with NOAA to pull the most recently reported observations directly from the Storm Prediction Center (SPC). Given the volume of SPC reports available each day, SpatialKey provides an advanced, yet simple, calendaring tool to help you target the desired set of reports.

To focus on just the Tornado events, disable the Hail and Wind layers. Use the histogram at the bottom of the screen to narrow your focus to just events within a specific date-time range.

Let’s zoom in and draw a possible storm path for the tornados in the Tulsa, OK area. Use the storm drawing tool to visualize patterns in the reported observations and build potential storm swaths with just a few clicks.

Once a storm swath has been created, you can add several risk bands to approximate exposure and apply damage factors.  Severe Storms will dynamically calculate loss potential for the entire storm footprint.  Moreover, you can analyze the composition of the exposed locations using analytic pods and export a listing of locations that are potentially impacted to submit to your claims teams to respond to the event.

As claims data comes in from the field, you can calibrate loss estimates using a combination of exposure data for locations without a claim (so far) and claims adjustments for locations that have a claim in process. Note: dark blue points in image below represent all insured location, larger light blue points represent actual claims reports.

Based on early claims data coming in from the field, you can adjust the storm swath to  more accurately represent my exposure in light of the new information.

To enhance customer satisfaction with an expedited response, you can use Severe Storms to locate your claims adjusters in the region and evaluate whether to deploy additional resources. Simply, add a dataset containing claims adjuster information and add custom circles to the map to track your coverage within proximity to the event.  Each black circle on the map below represents a 30-mile radius from either a local office or mobile office. If claims start coming in from city of Tulsa, where there is a large concentration of exposures, you may need to set up another mobile office.

As new intelligence is available, you can quickly communicate the most up-to-date loss assessment to your management teams.  This empowers executives to keep external stakeholders informed of the overall impact to the business and allows management to ensure customer satisfaction with an efficient and expedient response to the event.

Everything you need for your detailed severe storm analysis, together in a single SpatialKey Severe Storms dashboard!