Impacts of Weather

Weather impacts just about every facet of our lives. The severity of critical weather events, be it drought, temperature extremes, or storms is increasing every year. According to Statistica, global economic losses attributed to extreme weather in 2021 reached $329 billion.

While many industries are impacted by these extreme weather events, few are impacted more than the insurance industry. According to the Swiss RE Institute extreme weather events resulted in insured losses of over $105 billion in 2021, in line with a 6% annual increase tracked over the last decade. Alarmingly, insurance fraud is estimated in nearly 10% of property-casualty claims and has an annual impact of $40 billion in the US alone.

Weather Intelligence – Understanding past events to quantify future risk

The insurance industry is in the business of understanding and quantifying risk. Optimizing informed risk-based business decisions with actionable weather data is a core premise of Weather Intelligence. MyRadar has been providing easy access to actionable weather information for nearly a decade. With over 15 million monthly active users depending on our services it is safe to say we understand weather, the impact severe weather has on all walks of life, and the power of Weather Intelligence.

More recently MyRadar has released several Application Programming Interfaces (API’s) to provide a robust suite of endpoints designed to drive historical and forecasted weather intelligence into the rapidly expanding world of data science. Few disciplines produce the massive volumes of data as atmospheric science and forward thinking companies are scrambling to tap the incredible value of correlating weather events to actual business analytics.

The Power of AI

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is an advanced technology that enables computing resources to perform tasks that would normally require human interaction. AI essentially automates the process of intensive large data assessment and in recent years has become a critical component of business analytics and optimization across all industries. Machine learning technology is a subset of AI that enables a computer system to analyze massive amounts of historical data to make accurate assessments and predictions of future events. These technologies are perfectly positioned to exploit the wealth of information locked in these massive archives of weather data.

Benefits for Insurers and Underwriters

• Reduce fraud and quickly validate weather-related claims
• Confidently identify and quantify weather-related risks
• Communicate weather alerts to engage clients, increase retention, and reduce claims
• Optimize intelligent underwriting/rates to strengthen ROI
• Strategic pre-deployment of claims adjusters for efficient post-event support

MyRadar API for Continuous Weather Time-Series Analysis

The API provides easy end point access to a continuous time-series of High-Resolution Rapid Refresh (HRRR) weather data historically archived for 5 years with up to a 16-hour future forecast, for any location in the US.

The HRRR weather model is widely used by atmospheric scientists and is considered the best weather model for predicting short term weather conditions over the United States. It assimilates more observations and data sources into its initial conditions than other weather models. It also has a superior high resolution 3-km spatial grid and is one of the only weather models updated every hour of the day.

The API provides an enhanced suite of HRRR weather variables that has been specifically engineered to be machine learning-ready, making the lives of data scientists easier and eliminating the need for meteorological interpretation. Feature engineering provides enhanced data input into machine learning systems and can deliver additional intelligence to AI generated output.

As an example, standard historical data can determine if it was raining at when an accident occurred. Our enhanced variables can determine the intensity of the precipitation leading up to the accident. Machine learning can apply this intelligence to a broader data set and determine actual accident risk given certain weather types.

The API ecosystem provides a self-service customer experience and is structured around a well-defined method to share multi-dimensional data. This is a totally scalable solution designed to accommodate a single user and a single point or millions of users and millions of points.

API Endpoints

• Points - The “points” endpoint can be used for getting a single forecast cycle for one or more points. For every point that is requested, you will receive a time series for each weather variable provided.
• Historical Data - The ‘histdata’ endpoint builds a continuous time series of data for one or more points between a begin time and end time.
• Routes - The “routes” endpoint will perform a driving directions lookup between an origin and destination then provide a single time series that represents the weather forecast at each point along the route. Unlike the ‘points’ endpoint, the ‘routes’ endpoint will always return only one time series for each weather variable.

API Pricing

Monthly usage subscription and bulk download pricing is available. Contact MyRadar for details.