Using PRIMAVERA high-resolution global climate models for European windstorm risk assessment in present and future climates for the (re)insurance industry
<p>PRIMAVERA is a European Union Horizon2020 project about creating a new generation of advanced and well-evaluated high-resolution global climate models, for the bene&#64257;t of governments, business and society in general. The project has been engaging with several sectors, including &#64257;nance, transport, and energy, to understand the extent to which any improved process understanding arising from high-resolution global climate modelling can &#8211; in turn &#8211; help with using climate model output to address user needs.</p><p>In this talk we will outline our work for the &#64257;nance and (re)insurance industries.&#160; Following consultation with members of the industry, we are using PRIMAVERA climate models to generate a European windstorm event set for use in catastrophe modelling and risk analysis.&#160; The event set is generated from five different climate models, each run at a selection of resolutions ranging from 18-140km, covering the period 1950-2050, giving approximately 1700 years of climate model data in total.&#160; High-resolution climate models tend to have reduced biases in storm track position (which is too zonal in low-resolution climate models) and windstorm intensity.&#160; We will compare the properties of the windstorm footprints and associated risk across the different models and resolutions, to assess whether the high-resolution models lead to improved estimation of European windstorm risk.&#160; We will also compare windstorm risk in present and future climates, to see if a consistent picture emerges between models.&#160; Finally we will address the question of whether the event sets from each PRIMAVERA model can be combined to form a multi-model event set ensemble covering thousands of years of windstorm data.</p>