Did Irene fizzle?

Daily Beast media columnist Howard Kurtz leads the charge against how the media covered Hurricane Irene: . . . the apocalypse that cable television had been trumpeting had failed to materialize. And at 9 a.m., you could almost hear the air come out of the media’s hot-air balloon of constant coverage when Hurricane Irene was [...]

Irene’s predecessors: Gloria and Hugo

Here’s a storm track of 1985 Hurricane Gloria, via Stormpulse: Eerie, huh? Strolling around the internet, I’ve seen a lot of Northeasterners pooh-poohing Irene’s threat, reasoning that Gloria hit about the same way. Gloria didn’t destroy much, so Irene and its lower windspeeds will be a popgun by contrast. Here‘s Wikipedia on Gloria: Gloria’s high [...]

Irene: How bad?

No doubt now that Irene will pass just east of NYC, and first and foremost, I urge everyone to batten down the hatches. This is an insurance blog, so it focuses on the economic threat from the storm. On which, NYT blogger Nate Silver posted this: Apart from the potential loss of life in the [...]

Thoughts on Irene

Given the pace of events, I’m tweeting fairly regularly on Hurricane Irene. (See the column near the top left of this page, or check out http://twitter.com/#!/jimlynch9999.) All week I’ve tried to keep up-to-date on the path and intensity of this one. NOAA puts VA to NJ on hurricane watch: http://ow.ly/6d4rj || #Irene likely to hit [...]

Storm season starts spinning

As the stock market kind of, you know, melts, the Atlantic hurricane season appears to be heating up. Artemis channels Accuweather: So far, a high over Bermuda and a high over the U.S. have formed – in football terms – a blocking wall that has suppressed potential hurricanes off Africa, steering them too far south [...]

Citizens Property and investment income

Actuarial Outpost has picked up my post about how Florida’s state HO insurer, Citizens Property, can’t remain solvent through a substantial storm. The very sensible Outpost question  – what about the investment income? Unfortunately, as this snip from the 2011 budget (around page 12 of this pdf) shows, Citizens posts net investment losses: That line [...]

Cat (model) fighting

Guy Carpenter recently had a nice briefing on RMS’s movement to version 11 of its North America hurricane model. RMS is the market leader in cat modeling and its changes will influence what reinsurers charge for property covers. That, in turn, will affect the consumer price for homeowners and commercial property insurance. According to the [...]

Hurricane forecast summary

The Colorado State University hurricane predictions were released today. Guy Carpenter rounds up the picks so far: CSU is Colorado State – the most famous forecasters. WSI is Weather Services International. NOAA is yet to weigh in. Last year the numbers were 19/12/5, but of course you only need one big one to do real [...]

The year-end catastrophe scorecard

Today, in words, I got nothin’. Fortunately, Aon has released its encyclopedic analysis (pdf) of 2010 catastrophes, which caused $38 billion in insurance losses. So I got this chart: It compares the pre-season hurricane forecasts of Colorado State, the federal government (NOAA) and Tropical Storm Risk, an Aon-sponsored forecaster. All in all, three accurate forecasts. [...]

2011 ‘cane forecast: 17/9/5/72%

Business Insurance relays Colorado State’s early read on next year’s hurricane season: 17 named storms (9.6 is average year) 9 hurricanes (5.9) 5 major hurricanes (2.3) 72% that a major hurricane will hit next year For 2010, CSU forecasters predicted 18 storms. There were 19. Fortunately, they tended to steer clear of the U.S.