Natural Catastrophe models are used by re/insurance companies and their brokers, regulatory bodies, and financial institutions for a wide range of use cases.  Applications include pricing risk, managing portfolio risk, standardizing stress tests for solvency purposes, placing reinsurance, designing parametric insurance solutions, quantifying exposure to risk during construction, and more. 

Moody’s RMS (MRMS) catastrophe models are updated regularly, typically following the release of a new national seismic hazard map. In other cases, they are updated following a major event where new data and lessons learned can be incorporated.   After the 2010-2011 Canterbury Sequence of events in New Zealand, we leveraged a nationwide borehole database, a large array of groundwater monitoring stations, and extensive field observation to develop new methodologies for high-resolution liquefaction modeling.  After the 2011 Tohoku Earthquake in Japan, we used observed inundation and damage data to develop and validate a new probabilistic tsunami model for the country.  With the latest research in earthquake building performance, we have also introduced new vulnerability curves for unique industrial facilities and tall buildings.

On February 6, 2023, Turkey experienced two major earthquakes within the span of a day. The M7.8 and M7.5 sequence of events caused widespread and catastrophic damage across Turkey and northern Syria with nearly 200k buildings across 11 provinces completely destroyed or severely damaged.  The events were analyzed using the Moody’s RMS Turkey Earthquake model, highlighting the importance of earthquake clustering, basin effects, and progressive damage among other geophysical and structural characteristics.  Some of those lessons learned and how we plan on introducing these lessons into our future earthquake modeling efforts will be discussed in this seminar.

Bio

Renee began at Moody’s RMS (MRMS) in 2013, responsible for the Asia-Pacific suite of earthquake catastrophe models.  Her first project was focused on bringing new global tsunami solutions to the global re/insurance markets.  That work tied into the post-2011 Tohoku update of the MRMS Japan Earthquake and Tsunami Model.  In 2015, she transitioned to leading the Global Earthquake Product Management team, responsible for products representing half the core model business at MRMS at the time.  Since then, she has led the product release of more than fifteen regional and countrywide earthquake models which have been widely adopted and often regarded as the primary view of earthquake risk in the global re/insurance market.

Prior to RMS, Renee was an earthquake risk consultant at Arup in the Advanced Technology and Research group for six years. While at Arup, she advised Fortune 500 companies on facultative reinsurance transactions and conducted PML and builder’s risk assessments for lenders’ technical advisors, corporate risk managers, and brokers.  Renee is a licensed professional engineer in the state of California and holds a BS in engineering from Caltech and a PhD in civil engineering from Stanford University.