EP1 · Windstorms
Three decades of major European windstorms plotted by date, severity and insured loss: the clusters, the outliers, and the jet stream behind them.
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The XWS catalogue covers Europe and the eastern North Atlantic, seasons 1981 to 2013. It is a first-pass regional record, not a global one, and it holds the major named storms rather than every event.
Europe's winter storms are extratropical cyclones, a different animal from the tropical hurricanes of the Atlantic and Pacific. They draw their energy not from warm seas but from the sharp temperature contrast between polar and subtropical air, and the jet stream steers them east across the ocean.
A single peak gust does not capture a storm's damage. The Storm Severity Index (SSI) blends how strong the wind was, how much land it covered and how long it lasted into one comparable number, which is why the SSI ranking and the loss ranking do not always agree.
Windstorm is the largest recurring natural-catastrophe exposure for European insurers and their reinsurers, ahead of flood and far ahead of earthquake. Its defining habit is clustering: several damaging storms can strike within a single season, and losses aggregate.
The catalogue is the XWS eXtreme WindStorms record, covering Europe and the eastern North Atlantic only. No equivalent global open catalogue yet exists, so this series is a Europe-first-pass by construction.
The XWS catalogue in full: name, date, countries hit, peak gust, storm severity index and indexed insured loss for each of the 52 storms.
The storm that shut a continent. On 18 January 2007 Kyrill drove hurricane-force gusts across seven countries, scoring the highest severity index of the major loss storms and costing 6.7 billion dollars indexed insured.