If you were feeling hot, hot, hot last Thursday, it’s because the weather was breaking records, marking the warmest July day in the UK ever.
The mercury hit a scorching 38.1 degrees in Cambridge, the hottest place in the UK, while London got to 37.6 degrees.
The hottest temperature ever recorded in the UK was in Kent, where it hit 38.5 degrees in 2003.
The weather caused havoc all over the country with air conditioning failing and public transport services being reduced or cancelled because of the high temperatures.
Trains broke down across the country too, with some passengers being trapped on trains for hours at a time with no water or air conditioning. Some were even evacuated from carriages and forced to walk along the tracks, miles from the nearest station.
Luckily, a cool change hit on Friday, bringing much needed relief in the form of rain and lower temperatures.
But don’t get too excited yet. With the advent of the changing climate, experts say that heatwaves and extreme weather will be more likely occurrences in the future. And with these increases in hot temperatures, some are calling for the insurance industry to look more closely at risk modelling as a result.
Gareth Williams, CEO and founder of technology company YellowDog, is one of those people.
"As last Thursday was expected to be the UK's hottest day on record, the topic of risk-modelling and catastrophe-modelling around unseasonably extreme weather is now more pertinent than ever,” Williams said.
The extreme weather can result not just in broken down trains and people falling ill, but larger events like fires.
Carlos Mantecas, director of marine and cargo at Segwick, explains that while the UK hasn’t been impacted, fires have been particularly bad this year in a number of European countries.
“In recent years, we’ve seen how large forest fires have affected countries in central and northern Europe,” Mantecas said. “The increased incidence of winter drought and summer heat increases the risk of fires in countries that are not historically accustomed to this type of catastrophe.
“Major fires have impacted Spain, Greece and Germany over the past several weeks, and fire risk stretches across the continent. In the last years, the wildfire season has lasted longer than before, stretching from May or June through to October.”
If this sounds scary, it’s because it is. Earlier in the year the World Economic Forum (WEF) published its World Risks Report, and the number one risk was the failure of climate change mitigation and adaption.
YellowDog has developed some tools that they believe will help with risk management when it comes to extreme weather, by using data to model scenarios.
“By delivering the capability to access huge quantities of computing power, YellowDog’s technology enables more scenarios to be generated, improving the accuracy of forecasts while reducing the time it takes to generate each one,” the company explained.
“This kind of insight is of huge help for the management of risk in particular. For example, insurance companies are looking for ever increasing detail on which areas are susceptible to natural disasters, and when it happens, understand what their financial exposure Is before the inevitable claims start coming in.”
Williams believes that technology, like the type that YellowDog uses, can be a huge benefit when battling the extreme weather events and risk modelling in the coming years, and prove to be extremely helpful for insurance companies.
“Technology needs to be adopted far quicker if we are to better predict when these occurrences will take place and what the impact will be,” Williams explained. “Predictive data technology will help us forecast the impact of various extreme weather scenarios including flooding, wildfires and hurricanes to understand the financial implications of climate change events.
“Extreme temperatures like these will ultimately have a direct knock-on effect on the consumer, business insurance and the economy at large, so it's vital that we can build a clear picture as quickly as possible.”
