Kelly Hereid
AVP, Senior Research Scientist, Corporate Catastrophe Solutions, CHUBB
"Outstanding Problems in Catastrophe Modeling"
Abstract: Insurance companies rely on catastrophe models, which simulate thousands of years of natural disasters, to quantify their exposure to extreme events. However, many of these extremes are highly susceptible to impacts from climate change. Here I highlight key emerging research areas in the science of natural disaster modeling that may be influenced by climate change. The effect of sea level rise on hurricane storm surge, expanding boundaries in space and time of hurricane impacts, compound disasters that incorporate extreme rainfall events, and high-resolution hazards with a complex relationship to climate change are all opportunities for climate research to inform risk management practices in the public and private sectors.
Biography: A climate scientist and geologist by training, I am passionate about bridging the gaps between sources of new knowledge in the research world and end-users in the private sector. This is a two-way street, as my collaborations with researchers at Columbia University and NASA GISS have allowed me to highlight problems in the business world that opened up fruitful new avenues of academic research. My scientific specialty is the El Niño-Southern Oscillation, the largest driver of year-to-year climate variability, which is where changes in the ocean and atmosphere intersect most dramatically with short-term events like hurricanes and floods. However, my geology background and experience in the reinsurance sector allow me to be comfortable working with the full suite of natural perils.
I am excited to bring a flexible toolbox of stochastic modeling, geospatial analytics, machine learning, open source datasets, and social media to the field of catastrophe modeling.
