While we haven’t seen anything as egregious as depicted in the eco-disaster flick ‘The Day After Tomorrow,’( yet) the weather is definitely a force to be reckoned with. Storms, floods, earthquakes, hurricanes—they’re everywhere and they’re increasing. You can’t stop the weather, but you can insure yourself against it. WeatherBill is a newly launched ecommerce site which sells weather insurance to businesses and individuals. The site employs a complex forecasting algorithm to provide predictions. Anyone can take out a policy for weather in a specified area, chosen via a Google Maps mashup. Users set the options, customizing price and coverage. To be eligible for contracts you need to be an ‘accredited investor’. WeatherBill also provides free weather correlation tools so businesses can assess the impact of weather on their finances.
“WeatherBill is the first service to provide affordable and easy-to-use weather coverage to protect revenue and control costs for the 7 million U.S. businesses impacted by the weather.
WeatherBill coverage is safe and reliable. There is no unnecessary paperwork, no claims process, no proof-of-loss and no waiting for payment. WeatherBill is the only service that enables customers to customize, price and buy weather coverage online in just minutes, and pays automatically when bad weather occurs.”
Though the weather is forever with us, insurance against it is hard to come by. With WeatherBill anyone can take out insurance against unfavorable gales, high temps, low temps, rain, etc. And as everyone who’s watched that Gore docudrama knows, global warming is going to wreak some serious havoc. Weather insurance will become quite important.
Who will do the legwork, e.g. measuring rain etc—will the company itself do it, or will they simply outsource the job? Does the claim that this is mere gambling hold true?
