First Street's Director of Wildfire Modeling, Phil Cunningham, explains the complex science behind creating property-level wildfire risk scores for the entire country. A meteorologist by training, he details his journey from studying the physics of fire whirls with supercomputers to running millions of statistical fire simulations to help homeowners, insurers, and lenders understand their true risk, both today and 30 years in the future.
In this episode, you'll learn about:
First Street's Mission: How they model climate risk for the financial industry and consumers.
The Science of Risk Modeling: The process of simulating tens of millions of hypothetical fires to calculate burn probability and intensity.
From Supercomputers to Statistics: The difference between complex physics models and the faster models needed for risk assessment.
Your Zillow Fire Score: An inside look at the data that powers the risk ratings on major real estate sites.
Climate Migration: How data is revealing the trend of people moving away from high-risk areas.
The Threat of Pyroterrorism: A sobering discussion on how risk models can highlight vulnerabilities to intentional fires.
The Power of Personal Responsibility: Why, despite all the high-tech modeling, simple actions like clearing brush are still the most effective form of mitigation.
