Wind storm loss estimations in the Canton of Vaud

A storm loss model that was first developed for Germany is applied to the much smaller geographic area of the canton of Vaud, in Western Switzerland. 24 major wind storms that struck the region during the period 1990- 2010 are analysed, and outputs are compared to loss obser- vations provided by an insurance company. Model inputs in- clude population data and daily maximum wind speeds from weather stations. These measured wind speeds are region- alised in the canton of Vaud following different methods, us- ing either basic interpolation techniques from Geographic In- formation Systems (GIS), or by using an existing extreme wind speed map of Switzerland whose values are used as thresholds. A third method considers the wind power, inte- grating wind speeds temporally over storm duration to cal- culate losses. Outputs show that the model leads to similar results for all methods, with Pearson's correlation and Spear- man's rank coefficients of roughly 0.7. Bootstrap techniques are applied to test the model's robustness. Impacts of popu- lation growth and possible changes in storminess under con- ditions of climate change shifts are also examined for this region, emphasizing high shifts in economic losses related to small increases of input wind speeds.