Catastrophe risk modeller RMS has expanded its North America Wildfire HD Model Suite with the ability to achieve a granular view of wildfire risk in Canada.
RMS Canada Wildfire HD Model is designed to allow users understand how individual locations in Canada will be impacted by a wildfire event, via complex behaviours that characterise fire spread, ember accumulation, fire ignition, and smoke dispersion.
The model is said to provide a coast-to-coast, probabilistic wildfire view for 10 provinces on a simulation-based framework with millions of realisations across thousands of simulated years.
In constructing the model, RMS partnered with a number insurers, mitigation experts, and government agencies.
“Events such as Fort McMurray can threaten insurers with insolvency and point to the need to drill down into the wildfire risk, especially in the wildland-urban interface (WUI),” Michael Young, vice president, model product development, at RMS.
“These ‘black-swan,’ long-tail scenarios require analysis of potential risk accumulations, to provide reassurance to regulators, and must be managed through better risk selection and pricing.
“The RMS Canada Wildfire HD Model helps to identify future major urban conflagration events with analysis of structure-to-structure ignitions. It accounts for the contribution of damage from embers and losses from smoke damage.”
