The History of Kinetic Analysis Corporation: Part 1
Kinetic Analysis Corporation (KAC) provides our clients with a global view of natural hazards and their economic impacts. Since our inception in 2006, we have provided transformative data offerings and innovations to companies in the insurance and reinsurance industries, weather industries, government agencies, and emergency/risk management organizations. Until recently our focus was on the natural hazards (wind, storm surge, waves, and rainfall, see Figure 1) posed by tropical cyclones and the economic and facility impacts associated with these events (Figure 2). As KAC is about to embark on the release of a variety of different products, we thought we should acknowledge our past by examining KAC’s history. To that end, I spoke with someone familiar with the history of KAC, Steven Stichter, former CEO and current board member of KAC. Steven provided me with information on KAC’s history as well as historical background that might interest a wider audience. You can find more on the historical background below in Part I of this post. Part II (insert link) covers the evolution of KAC.
Figure 1: Example hazard layer for wind from Hurricane Ian in September of 2022. The highlighted blue polygon shows an area of wind potential in the 125-130 mile per hour range.
Figure 2: Map of economic loss estimates for Hurricane Lidia (2023) in Mexico. The highlighted blue polygon has been selected to show the potential losses as well as population impacts for Puerto Vallarta, Mexico.
Prior to KAC’s founding in 2006, there was significant interest in studying the risks and hazards posed by tropical cyclones in the Caribbean [1]. This was because the last few decades of the 20th century saw a series of destructive storms (David (1979), Gilbert (1988), Hugo (1989), Andrew (1992), Georges (1998) that wreaked havoc across the region [2, 3]. Despite this dramatic uptick in the destruction caused by tropical cyclones in the Caribbean, at the time there was no multilateral organization or approach in place to study disaster mitigation efforts for the region as a whole [1]. While some smaller-scale projects existed that examined these risks on individual islands, the need remained for a larger-scale approach to the study of natural disasters in the Caribbean and the destabilizing effects of these events. The first of these efforts was the Caribbean Disaster Mitigation Project (CDMP), which was completed in December of 1999 [1].
The CDMP was a joint effort of the Organization of American States (OAS) and the US Agency for International Development (USAID), with the goal of establishing sustainable public and private disaster mitigation mechanisms that measurably lessen loss of life, reduce potential damage, and shorten the recovery period after a disaster [1]. The project ran from September 1993 to December 1999. Two of the current members on the board of KAC, Steven Stichter and Jan Vermeiren, were actively involved in the managing and coordination of the efforts of the CDMP. Throughout its 6 years, CDMP worked on projects related to studying the impacts of natural hazards in the Caribbean (including projects related to volcanology and earthquakes), the vulnerability of these island nations, how to engage planners and investors in the assessment of storm risk, as well as how to implement newer technologies for storm surge modeling and related hazards [1]. A large component of this last piece was the development of the TAOS model, of which later versions are still used by KAC today [3, 4, 5].
TAOS, which is an acronym for “The Arbiter of Storms”, is a meteorological hazard model created by Chuck Watson for the Caribbean Disaster Mitigation Project [4]. It was developed to assist emergency managers, land use planners, and meteorologists in assessing the risks associated with meteorological hazards (wind, storm surge, rain, and waves). TAOS is especially powerful due to its customization abilities, which allow a user to select the parameters or methods most relevant to a problem, or even the use of multiple methods to create an ensemble approach (an ensemble approach is one that looks at many outcomes based on slight tweaks in the initial state of the system) [4]. While initially developed in the 1990s for CDMP, TAOS has been used widely over the years for applications ranging from real-time tracking of tropical storms, track forecasting, and modeling of storm effects (including probabilistic aspects for assessing real-time, seasonal, and overall historical risks) [4]. The model has been continuously updated to include more detailed descriptions of the geospatial hazards, as well as updated damage functions, exposure data for countries, and economic loss calculations to provide a more comprehensive view of the potential losses from an event [4, 5].
While originally born out of a desire to provide research and disaster mitigation strategies for countries in the Caribbean, CDMP would eventually foster a greater curiosity about natural disasters occurring worldwide. With destruction from these events escalating at the beginning of the 21st century, during the notorious Atlantic hurricane seasons of 2003, 2004, and 2005, there was a greater need to provide this data at a global scale [2]. In 2006, Jan Vermeiren, Steven Stichter, and Chuck Watson founded Kinetic Analysis Corporation with the goal of providing natural hazard data associated with, and loss data caused by, tropical cyclones occurring around the globe. The story of KAC’s evolution continues in Part II.
References
1. http://oas.org/cdmp/
2. https://www.nhc.noaa.gov/outreach/history/#gilbert
3. http://oas.org/cdmp/document/taos94.htm
4. http://oas.org/cdmp/document/taos/modl_des.htm
5. https://journals.ametsoc.org/view/journals/bams/85/11/bams-85-11-1713.xml