March 31 Central U.S. Tornado Outbreak

Respond Shapefiles | Summary
Posting Date: April 4, 2023, 7:00:00 AM

To help clients better understand impacts from the U.S. Severe Thunderstorm outbreak this past weekend, we are releasing a selection of daily straight-line wind and tornado hazard footprints from Verisk Weather Solutions’ Respond™ product, in shapefile format.  Two files are available for straight-line wind – one for March 31, the other for April 1; the tornado file is for March 31.  Instructions for importing the files into Touchstone’s Geospatial module are also included. These are samples of the full Respond™ product, which offers greater granularity in terms of wind speed contours and tornado probability.

Respond™ data shapefiles for hail, wind, and tornado can be used to:

• Overlay on exposure data to understand which risks and total value that could be impacted
• Understand the likelihood of a claim at a given location
• Accelerate recovery and response efforts
• Help determine veracity of claims and avoid fraud

Respond™ Wind considers both large-scale wind often associated with strong cold fronts and low pressure systems as well as small-scale wind from individual thunderstorms. Large-scale wind is estimated from weather model data while small scale wind also incorporates radar data. The modeled wind estimates for both large- and small-scale wind are also corrected for bias in real time using observations from wind reporting stations.  Respond Wind is updated hourly and delivered in a daily shapefile format, viewable within GIS mapping platforms.

The Respond™ Tornado solution provides a first estimate footprint of possible tornado-impacted locations. The solution provides the probability of any strength tornado occurring at a particular location by assessing data from weather radars in near real-time to detect areas of rotation and tornado debris signatures. It should be noted that because the data are probabilities, the full areal coverage of the product is likely to cover an area that is larger than where the actual tornado impacted.

You can read more about Verisk Respond™ analytics here, and please contact your Verisk representative with additional questions. 

The Verisk ALERT team is monitoring the forecast for severe weather activity across the central U.S. on Tuesday and will provide updates as warranted.

Respond Shapefiles | Downloads
Posting Date: April 4, 2023, 7:00:00 AM

The information provided herein is strictly confidential and is solely for the use of Verisk clients; disclosure to others is prohibited.

Downloads

Title	File Type	Description	Download
Respond Wind Shapefile for March 31	.zip	A shapefile containing estimated maximum 3-second wind gusts for the continential U.S. for March 31
Respond Wind Shapefile for April 1	.zip	A shapefile containing estimated maximum 3-second wind gusts for the continential U.S. for April 1
Respond Tornado Shapefile for March 31	.zip	A shapefile containing estimated tornado probability contours for the continential U.S. for March 31
Touchstone Import Instructions	.pdf	Instructions for importing the Respond shapefiles into Touchstone