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North America Flood
North America Flood

The Moody's RMS® U.S. Inland Flood HD Model offers a comprehensive and well-validated view of flood risk throughout the contiguous U.S., helping (re)insurers gain necessary insights into the range of commercial opportunities associated with the private flood market.

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Europe Flood
Europe Flood

The Moody's RMS Europe Inland Flood HD Models offer a comprehensive and customizable view of risk covering 14 European countries. Starting with precipitation, continuously simulated over a period of 50,000 years, the models explicitly account for spatial and temporal correlations across the whole Pan-European domain, which can be licensed as a bundle or for individual countries.

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Asia-Pacific Flood
Asia-Pacific Flood

Economic losses from weather-related events in Asia-Pacific average around $54 billion each year (Aon), and recent events such as severe floods in Japan and the Kerala floods in India during 2018, show that flood risk is breaking new records. Modeling all sources of flood risk is essential, and Moody's RMS has recently launched its Moody's RMS Japan Typhoon and Flood HD Model to help the industry understand both typhoon and non-typhoon flooding losses.

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Understanding Inland Flood Risk

With 2.2 billion people, or 29 percent of the world population, living in locations that are expected to experience some level of inundation during a 1-in-100-year event, (re)insurers face growing concentrations and severity of risk. To develop a profitable book of business, they must understand and quantify what drives flood risk to develop more effective flood risk management strategies. Take a quick look at what drives inland flood risk in this video.

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Understanding Inland Flood Risk

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Building a Complete View of Flood Risk on Risk Modeler

Moody's RMS Inland Flood Models capture all sources of flood risk, including fluvial and pluvial flooding, at the highest hazard resolution. In markets with coastal and inland flood risk, Moody's RMS offers hurricane and extratropical cyclone models to help you build the most comprehensive view of flood risk.

Watch this video to learn about the importance of building a complete view of flood risk. We analyzed the losses from Hurricane Harvey to demonstrate how tropical cyclone-induced flooding contributed to more than 75 percent of losses.

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Building a Complete View of Flood Risk on Risk Modeler

Flood accounts for 40%

of global natural hazard events (Munich Re)

Flood represents up to 25%

of all secondary peril insured losses in 2011-20 (SwissRe)

Nearly 29% of the world's population

is at risk of intense flooding  (World Bank)

Moody's RMS Global Flood Solutions

Flood risk poses unique challenges to stakeholders across the entire risk value chain – from the smallest domestic primary to the largest global reinsurer. Moody's RMS flood solutions are tailored to meet unique market needs with extensive loss validation, high hazard resolution, and the most up-to-date mitigation response, yet they are designed to tackle global flood risk by leveraging our robust, highly scalable cloud based, Intelligent Risk Platform™.

Season of Flood
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Primary Flood Risk Underwriting

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Regulatory Reporting and Solvency

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Portfolio Management

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Reinsurance Flood Risk Underwriting

Primary Flood Risk Underwriting

Our award-winning high-definition (HD) model framework enables modelers to explicitly capture the spatial and temporal correlations of flood risk as well as simulate losses at the location-coverage level, from the ground up, providing the most comprehensive representation of flood risk to help improve risk selection. Specialty add-ons are available for understanding the unique risk profiles of industrial facilities, buildings under construction, and marine cargo and specie across markets.

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Regulatory Reporting and Solvency

Confidently demonstrate to regulators that you have a complete understanding of your flood risk and comply with the corresponding local regulations. Optimize capital reserves and gain a full understanding of market risk by grouping flood models with correlated perils (such as windstorm) or with non-correlated perils (such as earthquake).

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Portfolio Management

Gain a detailed understanding of your flood risk including all sources of inland flooding such as fluvial and pluvial flooding, in addition to other, regionally important sources of flooding such as tropical cyclone-induced flooding. Make use of hundreds of primary risk classifications in addition to secondary modifiers to appropriately represent your exposure to flooding. Furthermore, exploit unique features such as bespoke fluvial flood defenses to build your own view of risk.

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Reinsurance Flood Risk Underwriting

Flooding is not constrained by geopolitical boundaries and can persist over a period of days to several weeks. In particular, large tail events may impact numerous countries at the same time, as well as disparate regions within a single country. With the explicit consideration of the correlation of flood risk in space and time, reinsurers can reliably assess their exposure to large losses across their portfolios and model complex policy terms, including hours clauses.

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Spotlight

Season of Flood

Season of Flood Webinar Series

Join us as we travel the globe to unravel some of the industry’s most complex flood risk management challenges – from closing the insurance gap to incorporating climate change into your risk decision.

In this series, we explore the evolution of flood risk and how technology, data, analytics, and a unified cloud platform can be applied to meet your flood challenges today and beyond. 

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Trading Risk Awards

An Award-Winning U.S. Inland Flood Model

The Moody's RMS U.S. Inland Flood HD Model was awarded the “Initiative of the Year” prize at the prestigious Trading Risk Awards held in London in 2019.

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Award

Award-Winning Europe Flood HD Models

Moody's RMS Europe Inland Flood HD Models won the “Best Catastrophe Risk Modeling Solution” Award at the 2017 InsuranceERM Awards held in London.

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Regional and Country Inland Flood Models

Regional Models

Click a region on the interactive map to see coverage.
See Global Model coverage
Global Map
North America Flood Models

  • United States

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North America Flood Models
Europe Flood Models

  • Austria

  • Belgium

  • Czech Republic

  • France (including Monaco)

  • Germany

  • Hungary

  • Ireland

  • Italy (including San Marino and Vatican City)

  • Liechtenstein

  • Luxembourg

  • Poland

  • Slovakia

  • Switzerland

  • United Kingdom

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Europe Flood Models
Asia-Pacific Flood Models

  • China

  • Hong Kong

  • India

  • Indonesia

  • Japan

  • Macau

  • Malaysia

  • New Zealand

  • Philippines

  • Singapore

  • South Korea

  • Taiwan

  • Thailand

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Asia-Pacific Flood Models
North America
Latin America
Europe
Asia-Pacific
North America Flood Models

  • United States

More
North America Flood Models
Europe Flood Models

  • Austria

  • Belgium

  • Czech Republic

  • France (including Monaco)

  • Germany

  • Hungary

  • Ireland

  • Italy (including San Marino and Vatican City)

  • Liechtenstein

  • Luxembourg

  • Poland

  • Slovakia

  • Switzerland

  • United Kingdom

More
Europe Flood Models
Asia-Pacific Flood Models

  • China

  • Hong Kong

  • India

  • Indonesia

  • Japan

  • Macau

  • Malaysia

  • New Zealand

  • Philippines

  • Singapore

  • South Korea

  • Taiwan

  • Thailand

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Asia-Pacific Flood Models

Frequently Asked Questions

What are the benefits of high-precision flood coverage across the globe?

Moody's RMS is the only catastrophe flood modeling partner that models 80 percent of global property gross written premium using a fully probabilistic approach that includes robust event sets and each model component validated by extensive local loss data. For flood risk outside of these markets, our innovative set of Global Flood Maps offers advanced machine learning insights built on a wealth of flood hazard data. With Moody's RMS flood models and maps, the Moody's RMS Global Flood Solutions Suite covers 100 percent of global gross written premium. Our unified approach to flood risk provides consistency across your business, helping you manage flood complexity, close the insurance gap with confidence, and build a comprehensive global portfolio.

Why are most Moody's RMS Flood Models run on Risk Modeler?

Flooding can develop from multiple types of weather systems, persist over a period of days to weeks, and have localized to widespread impacts across borders. Capturing all spatial and temporal correlations and building robust views of risk with converging tail losses requires a powerful simulation-based approach and large stochastic event sets. As a high-gradient peril, flood modeling also requires analyzing detailed hazard and exposure data to understand building-level flood risk. To build the most realistic view of risk, Moody's RMS models use the HD methodology only available on Risk Modeler™. This highly scalable, flexible, cloud-native application enables (re)insurers to access all their flood models using a single application running on shared data architecture without capacity or compute concerns.

How is climate change incorporated into your flood models?

Moody's RMS Flood Models are calibrated using recent data to reflect current climate conditions. We continually review the latest scientific research on climate change to ensure that our models reflect the latest scientific consensus. Moody's RMS also offers Climate Change Models that extend our industry-leading, comprehensive catastrophe models to capture the near- and long-term climate change risk outlook.

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News and Insights

Back To Start
Brisbane flooding
Blog
Australian Floods: Insurance Claims Rise Higher Than 2011 ...

The Insurance Council of Australia (ICA) reports that the unrelenting recent severe rainfall and subsequent flooding across Queensland and New South Wales in Australia have generated 163,853 insurance claims as of March 25, at an estimated cost of AU$2.451 billion (US$1.84 billion). Three East Coast Lows in succession across two weeks, from February 22 through to March 8, broke rainfall, river, and flood-depth records across parts of two vast states, at a time of heightened rainfall due to the continued influ...

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Thailand Flood
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RMS Launches New Probabilistic Flood Models to Simplify Fl...

The floods that severely impacted Malaysia and Indonesia between mid-December 2021 and mid-January 2022 remind insurers of the need to better manage flood risk in Southeast Asia, which also includes Singapore and Thailand. Thankfully, these recent floods did not reach the losses of the landmark 2011 Thailand Floods that still rank as second-highest insured flood loss ever recorded. To give (re)insurers the confidence to move forward with flood risk across a complex region, we are excited to announce the laun...

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Flood
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Decrease your Susceptibility to Poor Insured Decisions: S...

Originally appeared in PropertyCasual360 The loss response of a location exposed to a given peril can vary significantly, even when exposed to the same hazard. In this case study, we highlight the importance of utilizing risk characteristics to improve underwriting decisions and refine technical pricing of flood and hurricane business. Underwriting and pricing guidelines are often built and applied to locations based on their exposure to a given hazard. This determines which risks make their way into the ...

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Aerial coastal view
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Five Things You Probably Didn’t Know About Flood Risk (Par...

This second blog of the series delves further into new insights generated from the RMS® Global Flood Maps. We have combined the maps across multiple return periods with country population data from various censuses and river basin data. Read part one for global insights, read on for regional insights. Here are three thoughts on regions that are tackling flood risk and regions that are the most exposed, as we travel from Scandinavia to the Middle East and through to the banks of the Ganges. Let’s examine what...

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River
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Five Things You Probably Didn’t Know About Flood Risk (Par...

RMS® Global Flood Maps are already generating a wealth of insight. Over a series of two blogs, I will be highlighting five interesting points about flood risk – by combining the maps across multiple return periods with country population data from various censuses and river basin data. In this blog, we’ll focus on the first two points by looking at the global flood trends and the regions that are the most disproportionately affected by flooding. These regions often have significant and growing levels of expo...

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Flooded street
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Introducing RMS Global Flood Solution Suite: Manage All Yo...

The Global Flood Challenge: Coverage, Complexity, and Precision Whether you are a global (re)insurer or a local primary insurer, building a profitable book of flood business can be challenging. To develop more effective flood risk management strategies or expand coverage in new markets, businesses must understand and quantify what drives flood risk. What needs to be considered? First, recognize the structure of flood insurance products. They are tailored to specific markets and dependent on the type of...

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Tropical Cyclone flooding in Florida
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Four Influences on the FEMA 1 Percent Probability Flood Li...

Where did the 1 percent probability flood line (100-year flood), the baseline metric for the U.S. flood insurance market, originate from? Why is it so important? I encourage you to watch my webinar for the RMS® Season of Flood series as I discuss the history of the 100-year flood event and the importance and influence of this metric. As I detail in this blog, there are many factors that determine how the 100-year flood event line is drawn. In the webinar, I also analyze the key differences between the Federa...

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Aerial image of flooded community
Blog
Season of Flood: Flood Risk Is Complex. Managing It Should...

As the world has witnessed, the recent catastrophic flooding, and resulting loss of life and damage across Germany, Belgium, and neighboring countries has again underlined the devastating nature of severe flood events, and as a risk modeling business, it reminds us of the need to understand all aspects of this peril. What progress are we making on helping clients and wider stakeholders understand flood risk? RMS® has been modeling flood risk for over 20 years now, and this year represents one of our most imp...

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european flood
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European Floods and the Relationship with the North Atlant...

Stefano Zanardo, Principal Modeler, RMS Ludovico Nicotina, Senior Director – Modeling, RMS Arno Hilberts, Vice President, Model Development, RMS Steve Jewson, Scientific Research Consultant, RMS The North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) describes the fluctuations in the difference of atmospheric pressure at sea level between two semi-permanent centers of low and high pressure in the North Atlantic: the Icelandic Low and the Azores High. Fluctuations between these centers control the strength and direction...

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blog
Blog
Three Principles for Exposing the Hidden Risks (and Opport...

Building a profitable European flood portfolio is like walking a tightrope—a tricky balancing act. It is of course important to minimize your risk of significant losses. But while big losses certainly haunt the market—just remember the €1.7 billion claimed in the UK as a result of last December’s floods—being too cautious or overpricing will lead you to miss out on attractive opportunities.  Striking the right balance is no easy task. Flooding is a complex affair, with many factors to consider ...

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Theresa Lederer Flood
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The Value of Flood Protection: Quantifying the Benefits of...

Whenever the U.K. is hit by major flooding, attention quickly turns to the performance of the nation’s flood defenses. Some defenses, such as London’s Thames Barrier, are regularly recognized for their vital role in protecting people and property. The value of other mitigation measures, however, has been frequently challenged, such as when defenses failed to prevent significant flooding in Cumbria during storm Desmond in 2015. Notwithstanding such negative press, the prevailing view remains: mitigat...

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resource
Publications
Investing in Flood Risk Management and Defenses

Learn more about the financial benefits of flood defenses

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Twitter
Blog
Hurricane Florence: Rainfall up to a 1,000-year Return Per...

Florence’s much anticipated landfall occurred at 11:15 UTC (7.15 a.m. local time) today, Friday, September 14, near Wrightsville Beach, North Carolina, as a Category 1 hurricane. Florence remains just within the Category 1 hurricane classification on Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Wind Scale (SSHWS); as of the 18:00 UTC National Hurricane Center (NHC) advisory today, maximum sustained winds were 75 miles per hour (120 kilometers per hour). Previous observations showed that at Cape Lookout there were sustained winds of...

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waterfall
Blog
What If The Oroville Dam Had Collapsed Completely?

RMS modeling reveals the wider risk of U.S. flooding, and a significant protection gap A combination of heavy rainfall and melting snow had filled Lake Oroville in northern California near to its capacity. Dam operators released water through the main spillway to control the reservoir level, but a 300-foot hole unexpectedly emerged, and the surrounding soil was eroded by the water gushing out. Spillway outflows were reduced to stop the erosion. But this made the problem with rising reservoir levels worse, ...

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