PERILS ups loss figures for February cluster of storms

PERILS has disclosed its second loss estimate for the European windstorm series which affected the British Isles and Continental Europe from 16 to 21 February 2022.

The windstorm series consisted of three storms named Ylenia, Zeynep and Antonia by the Free University of Berlin, and Dudley, Eunice and Franklin by the UK Met Office.

Based on claims data collected from affected insurance companies, PERILS’ second estimate of the insured property market loss from the storm series is €3.6 billion. This estimate compares to the initial loss estimate of €3.3 billion, issued at the end of March.

The majority of the losses occurred in Germany, followed by the Benelux states, the United Kingdom and France. Losses in Austria were modest.

The storm series also affected Denmark and Switzerland, where impacts were limited, and Poland and the Czech Republic, territories which are not covered by PERILS.

The European windstorm series of February 2022 was driven by a strong jet stream which acted as a conveyor belt for low-pressure systems from the North Atlantic across the British Isles and on into Europe.

This large-scale weather pattern resulted in a clustering of three windstorms that hit similar areas within less than a week. Such windstorm clustering is not unusual for European extratropical cyclones but can pose a challenge for the insurance sector when allocating insurance claims to specific individual storm systems.

Moreover, reinsurance event definition clauses are not uniform in the affected territories and may include meteorological conditions as well as loss aggregation periods ranging from 72 to 168 hours.

Given these circumstances, PERILS is reporting the losses from the February 2022 European windstorm series as a single insurance event.