SBIR Phase I: Consumer Centric Parametric Insurance

The broader impact/commercial potential of this Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project is to bring climate risk management tools, including parametric insurance, to the consumer leisure travel, events, and outdoor recreation markets. This project quantifies the probability of contextually relevant weather events and presents these analytics through a suite of tools to help plan for weather variability. The project will make previously uninsurable weather and climate risks broadly insurable for the first time. This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project will develop a high-performance data service and application programming interface (API) for historical weather and forecast data to power an advanced machine learning data analytics front-end and an actuarial parametric weather insurance platform. The data service will access over 40 years of structured historical weather data recorded at hourly and sub-hourly temporal resolution and at spatial scales of less than 10 km, globally, in addition to multiple ensemble-based National Weather Prediction forecasts at similar spatial resolutions. This data service will power a front end capable of millions of location-specific queries and analysis requests per day. In order to accomplish the technical objective of second or sub-second access times, the open-source and proprietary software will need to be used in conjunction with existing cloud services provided by the leading cloud providers, principally caching, streaming, and scaling / load balancing. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.