Here at JBA, we’ve been making catastrophe models (cat models) successfully for over a decade. We believe it’s time to challenge the way these models are built, allowing us to fill gaps in model coverage and redress the balance of control from the vendor to the user. We want to help our clients to understand, manage and quantify their exposure to flood risk, more effectively and efficiently than ever before.
But why should we change our modelling mindset? And how can this be done?
Several factors tell us that a step-change is needed:
We believe that a balance is needed: keep the logic as simple as possible whilst directly using the best quality data for your modelling need. We can compute more today than yesterday, for the same relative cost, so we can move on from decade-old modelling techniques. Why summarise and over-engineer when this is no longer essential to get the model to run?
JBA has well-established Global Flood Maps and an event set with global coverage. Combined, these form the basis of a new Global Flood Model. Today’s technology enables us to handle data of this size in a probabilistic model. So we’re doing it, and in a way that overcomes the above challenges and creates a new modelling mindset.
Flexibility is key. We are enabling users to supply their datasets of choice to the software which runs the model. We have moved away from pre-baked models and towards a single runtime which incorporates more and more of those traditional model building stages. We are aiming to remove everything that ties our models to limited spatial domains, vulnerabilities or assumptions. We will run our future models on a single, interoperable modelling system with a variety of means of access, capable of supporting different levels of sophistication as the user or territory demands.
In doing this, we intend to free up cat modellers to concentrate on their key principles, and on the analyses they want to perform, rather than trying to bend fixed models to new purposes. As a skilled model provider, we will continue to provide a consistent, stable “JBA” view, but we will also make our models easier to challenge, explore, and influence. We aim to turn the concept of transparency from a buzzword into an approach that offers real user control.
Let's discuss this in person
If you're interested in finding out more about the current challenges in catastrophe modelling and how we're moving towards a new way of modelling with our Global Flood Model, please get in touch.
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