Aon Benfield, the global reinsurance intermediary and capital advisor of Aon P.L.C., said it has launched a U.S. severe thunderstorm scenario model.
Aon Benfield's catastrophe model development team at Impact Forecasting L.L.C. created the severe thunderstorm scenario model to help insurers estimate annual losses based on the last 12 years of historical severe thunderstorm data from the U.S. Storm Prediction Center, Aon said Monday in a statement.
According to Aon, severe thunderstorms have overtaken tropical cyclones as the costliest peril for U.S. insurers on an average annual basis.
“Over the last decade, severe thunderstorms have contributed towards an increasingly large portion of the insurance industry's global catastrophe losses. The roll out of Impact Forecasting's new STS model now means that insurers and reinsurers can effectively manage their risk and use the model's transparency to explain the details of their loss numbers and create their own view of risk from this peril,” Stephen Hofmann, executive managing director at Aon Benfield, said in the statement.
Harsh winter weather for the northern half of the globe may have cost the worldwide economy up to $4 billon in economic losses, according to a report released Tuesday by Impact Forecasting, Aon Benfield Group Ltd.'s catastrophe model development team.