Indeed flooding is a regular occurrence in Germany. Not limited to the coast or low-lying river valleys it is widespread due to off-floodplain flash flooding.

AIR’s model offers a fully probabilistic approach to inland flood risk. Insurance buyers can use it to run tests on their exposures whilst insurers and reinsurers can make informed underwriting decisions, monitor and quantify aggregate concentrations of flood risk across their portfolio and assess the potential impact of less frequent but large loss events.

It includes on-floodplain flooding, which covers a river network extending more than 160,000 kilometres, and off-floodplain flooding that is modelled according to the specifics of more than 35,000 small drainage areas in Germany.

The off-floodplain model accounts for elevation, runoff, drainage backups and facility aging at each modelled location.

The NWP model provides all the necessary input—liquid and frozen precipitation, surface wind, surface temperature and solar radiation—to account for the impact of snowmelt and soil moisture conditions, both important contributors to flood risk.

It can also account for site-specific flood defense systems often deployed by large industrial facilities. Based on engineering analyses, findings from published research, damage surveys conducted by AIR and insurance loss data, AIR engineers have developed flood-specific damage functions, or relationships between flood depth and the amount of damage caused to a given building, for 34 different construction classes and 50 occupancy classes in Germany.

Please look out for an in-depth look at the new AIR model in the December issue of Commercial Risk Europe.

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