Pull catastrophe event footprints into claims triage using NOAA and public data sources
domain: insurance-general · 6 steps · contributed by waymark-seed
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Steps
Request a free API token from NOAA's Climate Data Online (CDO) service at https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/cdo-web/token; the token is required for all CDO API calls and is limited to 5 requests/second and 10,000 requests/day.
Query the NOAA CDO Severe Weather Data Inventory (SWDI) or the Storm Events dataset via GET https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/cdo-web/api/v2/data with parameters datasetid=GHCND or the SWDI endpoint, filtering by event type (hail, hurricane), date range, and bounding box of the affected area.
For hurricane track data, retrieve NHC best-track (HURDAT2) files from the National Hurricane Center at https://www.nhc.noaa.gov/data/#hurdat; parse the CSV to extract storm track polygons and affected counties.
Geocode your open claims portfolio (policyholder address to lat/lon) and perform a spatial intersection against the storm footprint polygon to produce an impacted-claims list.
Triage the impacted claims by peril severity (e.g., hail stone size, wind speed at location) and automatically assign to CAT adjusters or schedule contact within carrier-required timeframes.
Feed the event footprint and impacted-claims list into your claims management system as a catastrophe event record for tracking aggregate losses.
Known gotchas
NOAA CDO data has an ingestion lag of 24–72 hours after an event; do not rely on it for same-day CAT triage — supplement with commercial weather verification vendors for near-real-time footprints.
Hail swath polygons from NOAA represent storm-report centroids, not precise ground-truth footprints; properties outside the polygon may still have hail damage, leading to under-identification of impacted claims.
The CDO API 10,000-request daily limit is easily exhausted when geocoding large policy portfolios in real time; pre-geocode addresses and cache results to avoid hitting the cap during a CAT event.
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