AIR Worldwide updates US wildfire model

AIR Worldwide has released an updated wildfire model for the United States, the catastrophe modeling firm said Monday.

Designed to cover the 13 westernmost conterminous states, the model uses historical fire data to characterize fire behavior and accounts for the variability in weather and its impact on fire behavior, Jersey City, New Jersey-based AIR said in its statement. The historical data includes the 2017 Tubbs/Atlas and Thomas fires in California.

The model simulates how fires spread into areas based on wind speed and direction, availability of fuels, terrain, and likelihood of suppression, and accounts for the different ways fires spread, the statement said.

The model also calculates flame length at each time step, which is directly correlated with the intensity of the fire and used to estimate the severity of its damage as well as account for risk characteristics specific to wildfire-defensible space.

The wildfire model for the United States is currently available in the Touchstone, Touchstone Re, and CATRADER catastrophe risk management systems, the statement said.

“With residential and commercial development continuing to increase in areas prone to wildfire risk, the model explicitly accounts for this increased penetration into the wildland-urban interface,” Tammy Viggato, senior scientist for AIR Worldwide, said in the statement. “Approximately one-third of the U.S. population currently lives in the wildland-urban interface in the United States, where most wildfire-related losses occur, and this figure continues to grow rapidly.”

Insured damages from wildfire so far this year are likely to top $1 billion, according to reports.