Claire Souch (pictured) is vice president of Model Solutions at Risk Management Solutions. Jeff Waters is a senior risk analyst with the catastrophe risk modeler.
For recent hurricanes, including Sandy in 2012, storm surge was the principal driver of U.S. hurricane insured losses. For many of these hurricanes the damage caused by the storm surge far outweighed the wind-driven impacts. And yet, many storm surge models have been shown to underestimate the potential insured losses of precisely these types of disproportionately large storm surge events.
To understand why, we must first understand the physics of storm surge. The magnitude and extent of storm surge flooding is influenced by a series of factors. These include hurricane characteristics such as wind speed, forward speed, central pressure, and storm size in the days preceding landfall, as well as tidal levels, offshore bathymetry, and coastal topography.
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