PERILS has estimated that the European windstorm series over Britain and Europe in February caused a loss to the insured property market of €3,610m up from its March estimate of €3,289m.
The windstorm series consisted of three storms named Ylenia, Zeynep, and Antonia by the Free University of Berlin, and Dudley, Eunice, and Franklin by the UK Met Office. Most of the losses occurred in Germany, followed by the Benelux states, the United Kingdom and France. Losses in Austria were modest. The storm series also affected Denmark and Switzerland, where impacts were limited, and Poland and the Czech Republic, territories which are not covered by PERILS.
In a statement, PERILS said: “The European windstorm series of February 2022 was driven by a strong jet stream which acted as a conveyor belt for low-pressure systems from the North Atlantic across the British Isles and on into Europe. This large-scale weather pattern resulted in a clustering of three windstorms that hit similar areas within less than a week. Such windstorm clustering is not unusual for European extratropical cyclones but can pose a challenge for the insurance sector when allocating insurance claims to specific individual storm systems.”
It added: “Moreover, reinsurance event definition clauses are not uniform in the affected territories and may include meteorological conditions as well as loss aggregation periods ranging from 72 to 168 hours. Given these circumstances, PERILS is reporting the losses from the February 2022 European windstorm series as a single insurance event.”
PERILS said that an updated estimate of market loss from the storm series will be made available on 19 August 2022, six months after the event end date. The loss information in this third report will be provided in the form of an industry loss footprint with losses broken down by CRESTA zone and property line of business.
