JBA Risk Management Working With NVIDIA on Flood Modelling

Flood modelling is all about the data, although past events are not 100% accurate when it comes to future risks. But collating and analysing all local terrain, flood & weather history, asset values, new builds etc. has to be the way ahead.

Flood risk specialist JBA Risk Management has explored the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in its market-leading flood risk catastrophe models. Working in collaboration with NVIDIA’s Earth-2 team, the integration focuses on leveraging AI-driven weather models to enhance the understanding and representation of extreme and rare events for the insurance and risk sectors.

JBA’s work with the NVIDIA Earth-2 platform demonstrates the potential of AI-powered approaches in improving catastrophe modelling by better capturing previously hard-to-model extreme weather occurrences. The initiative builds on previous work using Earth-2 by the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the University of California, Irvine.

At the core of the research is NVIDIA Earth-2, a development platform that enables the integration of AI models to create high-resolution digital twins of the Earth’s atmosphere. Earth-2 provides tools and models to improve catastrophe modelling through the creation of richer event sets that contain previously unseen but plausible extreme weather occurrences. Powered by NVIDIA AI, the approach can generate multiple realisations of weather conditions all consistent with the underlying state of the atmosphere, doing so at a speed well beyond traditional numerical weather prediction methods.

David Wood, Managing Director, JBA Risk Management, commented: 

“At JBA, we are always looking for ways to advance natural hazard and catastrophe modelling. Integrating NVIDIA technology has allowed us to use AI weather models to broaden our simulation of extreme events, enabling us to build on our market-leading position and provide our clients with improved views of risk. We feel this collaboration marks a significant step toward the next generation of risk models.”

Dion Harris, Senior Director of HPC and AI Factory Solutions at NVIDIA added:

“NVIDIA Earth-2 represents a significant step forward in harnessing AI-accelerated models, to enhance JBA’s flood risk management capabilities. By integrating NVIDIA’s advanced AI-driven weather forecasting tools, JBA can provide clients with more precise and timely insights to effectively simulate real-world climate and weather outcomes and enable greater preparedness.”