tropical storm

The 2009 Atlantic hurricane season is due to start on the 1st June. As if to prove the unpredictability of the weather, Mother Nature has chosen to start things a little early this year and the first tropical depression of the season has formed off the east coast U.S. The storm is currently carrying winds […]

The Atlantic Tropical Storm and Hurricane Season officially starts on the 1st of June. With less than two weeks to go we thought we’d give you an update on how some of the best respected forecasters see the threat from the 2009 season. It seems that the Atlantic tropics could become active sooner than we […]

Marsh has teamed up with Berkshire Hathaway to create a windstorm insurance program aiming to bring capacity back to the hard-hit energy companies who operate in the Gulf of Mexico. The program has been called the Cost and Certainty Coverage Program (or Triple C for short) and carries $500m of aggregate, annual capacity. Underwritten by […]

Initial loss estimates from windstorm Klaus which struck Europe at the weekend (France and Spain specifically) have been released by two risk modelling firms. AIR Worldwide and EQECAT have both released their officia figures. The loss estimates are quite different as is usual in these cases, we expect the final losses to sit somewhere in […]

The inevitable appears to be happening. State Farm have announced that they intend to leave the Florida property insurance market within two years. This has been on the cards for some time as State Farm has consistently been battling with insurance regulators over proposed rate hikes which State Farm said they needed in such a […]

Hopefully you will have read our previous post about the damaging windstorm which hit France and Spain at the weekend. Windstorm Klaus tore through these areas causing widespread damage and killing upwards of twenty people. Loss estimates have not yet been released but there is a risk of impact to catastrophe bonds which have exposure […]

Chicago, Wednesday January 21st 2009 – The 2009 hurricane season is already underway in the financial marketplace as CME Group announced trading activity on the first day of opening the 2009 contracts. This starts the season nearly five months ahead of the 2008 season. According to CME Group, 3000 Seasonal Maximum Binary Option contracts were […]

Karen Clark & Co., the catastrophe risk consultancy, has published a paper discussing near term hurricane models and how well (or badly) they have performed. They discuss the three big risk modelling companies who launched their near-term hurricane models in 2006 – AIR Worldwide, EQECAT and Risk Management Solutions (RMS). It makes for interesting reading […]

There’s a saying in England that buses always come in two’s, usually heard from people who’ve been standing at a bus stop for a long time. It seems hurricane forecasters have heard it too. Colorado State University have just released their first forecast for the 2009 Atlantic Tropical Storm season. William Gray’s team have predicted […]

I was lucky enough to be invited to attend the latest seminar run by the Willis Research Network (WRN) yesterday evening. The WRN is a partnership between academia and the insurance industry which focuses on evaluating the frequency, severity and impact of extreme events. The event outlined the latest research on two topics; tropical cyclone […]