CoreLogic Expands Insurance Offerings with Hail, Wind and Lightning Weather Forensics

CoreLogic, a global property information, analytics and data-enabled services provider, has expanded its natural-hazard risk-management capabilities through the addition of Weather Fusion hail, wind and lightning weather forensics to provide near real-time property-specific weather event verification.

The combination of proprietary CoreLogic data and analytics with Weather Fusion weather peril verification will enable the insurance and other industries to more reliably identify loss shortly after a weather event occurs through single-source access to multiple weather data sets and solutions.

CoreLogic offers more than 30 weather peril verification and natural hazard risk reports nationwide, helping risk managers across all industries proactively manage risk and loss associated with extreme weather, natural hazard and catastrophe events. According to the Insurance Information Institute, insured losses due to hail and thunderstorms alone totaled $25 billion in 2011 and $14 billion in 2012. The new CoreLogic hail, wind and lightning reports will enable insurers, underwriters, property managers and owners to confidently verify the cause and date of damage and losses near real time, saving critical time and money. A product performance assessment completed by the top five Insurance Carrier’s Claims Department concluded that the Weather Fusion hail algorithm is four times more effective at identifying address-level hail fall than current hail detection algorithm-based hail data.

CoreLogic analysis indicates that hail and wind claims are among the most significant categories of property damage expense. Insurance Information Institute data shows from 2007 to 2011, the average claim totaled $7,177, with $30 out of every $100 collected in a homeowner’s insurance premium typically going toward wind and hail claim payments. Credibly verifying damages caused by wind, hail and lightning at the property level has traditionally been a challenge for insurers. The addition of Weather Fusion science and weather forensic reports helps CoreLogic solve this challenge by delivering:

• Historical address-level weather event insight for underwriter examination that ultimately results in smarter, more informed policy decisions.
• The ability to accurately distinguish what areas were actually impacted and what size hail fell during a weather event.
• Hail reports shortly after a severe weather event occurs, with maps updated as frequently as every hour.
• Timely notifications of hail activity for custom addresses, as well as the previous day’s hail activity.
• The ability to reduce fraudulent claims attributed to severe weather and accelerate the claims verification process by provisioning information directly after a weather event.
• A Hail Risk Score, which compares address-specific historical hail events against historical claim experience for all relevant hail locations in the U.S., refreshed daily.
• Digital plots of hail paths for impacted geographic areas and color-coded by quarter-inch increments illustrating hail from three-quarters of an inch to four inches in diameter.
• Historical hailstorm data at a custom address-specific location, including hail claim verification with the dates and sizes of hail for each hailstorm, within one, three and ten miles of the address.
• Address-specific lightning strike analysis, along with date and time (to the nearest millisecond), including count of individual lightning strokes, custom maps, latitude/longitude, polarity (negative or positive) and amplitude of a stroke.
• Wind Risk Scores, designed to verify maximum wind gust and direction at an individual address level.

“Traditionally, wind event verification has been considered an unsolvable problem and was based on public safety algorithms or relied on hand-drawn maps and single-point data observations collected from the nearest airport locations,” said Jay Kingsley, senior vice president for CoreLogic Insurance and Spatial Solutions. “Now, the unique weather science and data techniques behind our wind, hail and lightning solutions will provide insurance carriers with a more scientific approach to understanding individual property damage from storms,” continued Kingsley.  “Though billions of dollars are paid out every year for exterior damage to homes, up until now there has been no real way to credibly verify these losses. CoreLogic now provides a more powerful, data-driven approach to this problem through weather peril verification reports.”