Hazard Analytics

Advanced, Validated Hazard Analytics

Natural hazards are complex, multifaceted events with drastic effects on properties and assets.  Predictive hazard analytics help you manage natural hazard risk exposure using up-to-date geographic and scientific data. Our scientists use quantitative techniques to evaluate impact probability at property level, enabling you to account for risk exposure and determine necessary costs.

Using an easily understood scoring system, these analytic models reduce the time needed to measure risk accumulation, giving you an edge in a market where underwriting decisions need to be made quickly and confidently.  Our natural hazard analytics guide you toward better-informed pricing decisions to help mitigate future risk.

Advanced Storm Surge Analytics Enhance Your Coastal Risk Profile

More than 53 percent of the U.S. population lives in a coastal county, where exposure to extreme weather systems is increasing annually. To reduce their risk exposure, property and casualty companies concerned about coastal exposure are implementing strategies to reduce risk—strategies that are often broad and range from statewide new-policy moratoriums, mandates against issuing policies within a certain distance of the coastline or completely pulling out of coastal areas.

At CoreLogic, we provide increased granularity by combining five data sets—coastal surge risk, hurricane propensity, coastal water feature, mainland determination and elevation—into an understandable, easy-to-use scoring method.  We provide a more accurate, property-based methodology to understanding hazard risk information that improves underwriting by increasing your understanding of coastal risk exposure—without resorting to broad-brush exclusion strategies.

Storm Surge allows you to improve underwriting decisions, as well as:

• Reduce loss potential and adverse selection over traditional insurance practices
• Understand your potential for surge loss
• Determine the potential for hurricane losses resulting from storm surge 

We can provide coastal surge and hurricane propensity files for the Atlantic and Gulf coastal areas exclusively, while other data sets cover all coastal waters and the Great Lakes.

Understand Your Exposure to Flood Risk

Flooding is the nation’s leading cause of property damage. To accurately assess flood risk, our basic flood-data package incorporates three key elements:

• FEMA flood zone designation
• Whether the property is within or outside a high-risk flood zone (Special Flood Hazard Area)
• Straight-line proximity to nearest Special Flood Hazard Area

We start with the industry’s most comprehensive database of digital flood maps and related data, and then continuously update the database to reflect FEMA’s most recent studies, Letters of Map Amendment and other necessary changes. We regularly review and test all data to maintain stringent quality standards.

Flood Risk Score Provides a New Perspective on Flood Risk

The majority of underwriting guidelines rely on whether a property is in or out of a federally designated flood zone, yet, historically, 25 to 30 percent of flood insurance claims come from properties located outside those zones.

Although federal flood maps remain useful in limited situations, underwriting private insurance requires a more advanced and precise risk assessment that identifies higher-risk properties outside designated flood zones and lower-risk properties inside flood zones, while including additional key risk factors, such as nearby levees and dams. Flood Risk Score provides this advanced level of risk assessment on both riverine and coastal surge flooding.

Primarily used as an advanced tool to enhance underwriting capabilities, you can also apply Flood Risk Score to policies and portfolios, offering enhanced aggregate analysis capabilities.

Wildfire Analytics Provide Property-Level Assessment of Wildfire Risk

Increasing residential development near or adjacent to the wildland urban interface (WUI) means increased wildfire home losses.  Cost estimates to protect these structures are estimated at more than $1 billion each year.  To reduce loss exposure, you must ensure that policy premiums and underwriting guidelines correctly reflect potential risk.

Our wildfire risk database identifies an individual property's risk vulnerability, providing the information you need for accurate underwriting.  Developed using our modeling expertise and the recognized best practices of government and fire research laboratories, our database identifies property-risk potential by scoring the risk based on the property's distance to high brush-fuel zones, and the distance to the WUI.

The wildfire risk database consists of two key data layers:

Brushfire Fuel Rank

The Brushfire Fuel Rank data model assesses relative brushfire risk based on four factors: slope, aspect, vegetation (fuel), and vegetation composition. The mathematical combination of these four variables results in a numeric range of values that is subsequently divided into four risk categories: very high, high, moderate, or low. This model simplifies risk assessment and provides reliable information needed to accurately determine brushfire risk for a defined area or specific location.

FIREbreak+

FIREbreak+ is the first comprehensive tool for accurately assessing brushfire risk along the WUI.  It identifies a policy's proximity to high-risk vegetation and its residential density class, helping you make informed risk determinations for AK (populated areas only), CA, CO, FL, ID, MT, NV, NM, OR, UT, WA and WY.

Single Wildfire Risk Score

Single Wildfire Risk Score rates properties on a 0-100 scale, giving you increased flexibility in determining risk categories, as well as an opportunity to utilize the data in other applications.

Based on our statistical analysis of thousands of wildfire home losses, the four contributors to wildfire loss are weighted to generate a single risk score.  The risk scale allows you to create a proprietary set of conditional rules, enabling you to:

• Accurately write policies without extensive on-site investigations
• Carefully consider policies in areas where the brushfire risk is disproportionately high due to location characteristics
• Flag locations for on-site inspection using on- and off-property brushfire risk factors

Understand Earthquake Risk at the Property Level

The United States has averaged more than 3,000 individual earthquake events every year since 1999. Our earthquake risk database incorporates current earthquake science and information, producing a probabilistic risk database covering all 50 states. The modeled database accounts for peak ground acceleration (ground shaking), earthquake faults, geologic structure, and soil type to produce the earthquake-hazard risk estimate.

Integrated into CATUM, our insurance solution, the earthquake risk database enables you to accurately locate and assess insured properties for earthquake risk.

Fire Protection Class (FPC) assists insurers in fire-risk calculation for residential, commercial and public properties, based on available fire suppression capabilities. FPC is a component of CATUM, our insurance enterprise solution, providing policy lifecycle risk management. Our precise geospatial location determination and spatial analysis allow you to establish fire premiums confidently and accurately.

Geospatial Fire District Zone Determination

The closest fire station is not always a property’s servicing fire station. To determine which is, we developed geospatial fire station district boundaries for every fire department across the country, using our PxPoint™ geocoder and fire district boundary layer. At the time of construction, FPC automatically assigns the correct station based on the property’s location. Additionally, using geospatial boundary determinations expedites fire district boundary reassignments, globally updating all affected properties.

Using FPC Data Analytics

FPC uses latitude/longitude, parcel data, municipality boundaries, servicing fire station districts, and road networks to provide spatial analysis that is critical to risk management and premium pricing. Latitude/longitude and parcel data precisely locate the property, municipality boundaries determine proximity to fire hydrants, and fire station districts depict the responding station location. Our road networks add another information layer, providing driving distance from the nearest station to the property.

FPC gives insurers the freedom to develop their own risk scores and pricing methodologies making use of the following criteria, as set forth by the American Association of Insurance Services, Inc.:

Protected

Buildings located within five road miles of a responding fire department and within 1,000 feet of a fire hydrant.  Within this class are a set of sub-classifications based upon distance from the responding fire department:

• Protected 1 – within one mile
• Protected 2 – between one and two miles
• Protected 3 – between two and three miles
• Protected 4 – between three and four miles
• Protected 5 – between four and five miles

Partially Protected

The building is located more than 1,000 feet away from a fire hydrant, but is within five road miles of a responding fire department.

Unprotected

Buildings located in areas that are classified as neither protected nor partially protected.

Understand Your Total Geographic Exposure

Accurately identifying policy risk concentration within a given geographic area is a critical component of risk management. Traditionally, risk concentration is measured by counting policies within a defined geographic region, such as counties, cities or ZIP codes. This method does not identify whether those policies are clustered or dispersed, though, and only partially solves the problem.

To address this, we developed a set of variable-area grid layers for all 50 states.  Those layers are integrated into our insurance solution, CATUM, as layer options. CATUM processes street addresses and appends cell identifications to each record according to the selected grid matrix. You can then import files into your reporting application and generate reports detailing policy numbers and total exposure in a specific area. We can ship appended files in shapefile format for map display.