We recently published our 750th In Focus blog and that milestone is an opportunity to review some of the great content we have shared. We said when we launched this blog that, “You are the focus of In Focus,” adding that our goal is “to provide you with industry-related news and commentary, insights into natural catastrophes and catastrophe modeling, some useful tips, and hopefully a little fun along the way.” It still is!
A total of 187 subject matter experts at Verisk have contributed to posts covering the whole gamut of the risks that we model from agriculture and casualty-liability to tropical cyclones and wildfire. Verisk software solutions such as Analyze Re, Arium, and Catalog Viewer have shared the limelight with services including our global resilience and supply chain practices.
We’ve touched on non-modeled risks—heatwaves, dam failure, and lava flows, for instance—while keeping our focus firmly on topics top of mind in the industry such as climate change and the global protection gap. And we’ve shared learning points when marking the anniversaries of significant events, among them the Great Alaska Earthquake of 1964, the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami, and 9/11.
Seiches, the polar vortex, atmospheric rivers, the Fujiwhara effect, bombogenesis, the brown ocean effect, and other natural phenomena have been explored, we’ve explained some technology (dropsondes, for example), and shared reports from a few of the damage surveys we’ve conducted after significant events.
Highly technical topics such as recency bias, bootstrapping, and the use of notional data for relativity analysis have been covered and we’ve even taken you flying into the eye of a hurricane. But this hasn’t stopped us tackling lighter subjects from hail cannon and storm names to considerations when building a sharknado model or asking if sports fans can really trigger earthquakes. We’ve highlighted a couple of our corporate social responsibility activities (helping children envision themselves as engineers or Monte Carlo or Bust!) and of course, we invite you to enter our annual hurricane contest and take our Year in Review Quiz to have a little fun.
Of the more than 750 blogs that we have now posted, those with the highest numbers of unique pageviews are:
#5 Five Countries Most Frequently Hit by Natural Disasters by Jonathan Kinghorn, September 24, 2015.
#4 How Widespread and How Extreme Was the Texas Freeze and Why? by Marc Marcella, June 3, 2021.
#3 Why Storm Surge Was So Devastating for Tacloban by Jonathan Kinghorn, November 8, 2018.
#2 Ductility and Stiffness—What They Are and Why They Matter in an Earthquake by Andrew O'Donnell, and Julia Krezel, December 16, 2016.
#1 Did You Know There's More than One Type of Tornado? By Jonathan Kinghorn, June 6, 2019.
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