# Weather Insurance Policies



## Vol (Jul 5, 2009)

This would have been very beneficial for many growers in the Mid-West this year....anyone have these type of policies and tell us about your pricing.

Regards, Mike

http://www.agweb.com...rance_pays_out/


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## Mike120 (May 4, 2009)

Interesting.....

_At the heart of TWI is the company's technology platform, which ingests weather measurements from 2.5 million locations and forecasts from major climate models on a daily basis, and processes that data along with 150 billion soil observations to generate 10 trillion weather simulation data points used in the company's weather insurance pricing and risk analysis systems._

I'm reasonably sure they are getting their data feeds from the European Space Agency's Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity (SMOS) mission. This is a unique application of the data and because it detects moisture 1-2 meters deep it's much better than local sensors.


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## Vol (Jul 5, 2009)

I sure hope some of our folks have this insurance or are familiar with it as I also find it extremely interesting. Thats one heck of alot of data Mike120....insurance cos. could really refine the payout odds with that extreme amount of weather information.

Regards, Mike


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## Mike120 (May 4, 2009)

Vol said:


> Thats one heck of alot of data Mike120....


It takes a LOT OF DATA to build decent weather models and ground moisture/ocean salinity are important variables. In the past this was collected by a lot of local stations like the West Texas Mesonet that are expensive to build and maintain. With SMOS you get a full earth view every 3 days. Right now the Europeans have the more accurate forecast model with the ECMWF (European Centre Medium-range Weather Forecast). You can see the latest runs for all the different models at www.wunderground.com, Maps & Radar, Model Maps. You can also get the latest results from weather.unisys.com or www.weather.gov. but they are snapshots. Wunderground is the only place I've found where you can see the run results as a timed sequence.

This is one reason that I'm somewhat cynical about the "climate change" alarmists. You can extrapolate trends, years in the future, to paint almost any picture you want. People have been trying to do it for years on the weather and the stock market with only marginal success.........


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