Tech offers a virtual window into future climate change risk

Source(s): Scientific American, a Division of Nature America, Inc.

By Daniel Cusick

[...]

Known as “climate risk analytics,” the delivery of data-based predictive information about risks associated with wind, floods, fires, droughts and other climate disasters is rapidly proliferating, according to experts.

Some of the new analytics firms are highly specialized, tailoring their products to distinct economic sectors, like housing, agriculture or transportation.

Others are taking much larger bites out of the data universe and building dynamic analytical models that can be applied at the community or even regional scale, offering virtual windows into a future altered by climate change.

[...]

Industry insiders say supercomputing has eclipsed traditional “catastrophic risk modeling,” whose primary practitioners were banks and property insurers, in many ways. Supercomputing data comes from myriad sources, including weather stations, soil and water sensors, tidal gauges, satellites, cellphone signals, and drones that can feed real-time information to analytics experts on the ground.

[...]

“The technology has gotten to the point where it’s now practical to say what is the risk for this particular house or this particular hospital. That wasn’t possible 10 years ago,” said Craig Fugate, the former Obama-era Federal Emergency Management Agency administrator who today is One Concern’s chief emergency management officer.

[...]

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