Learn how to interpret the interactive wind maps to understand a property’s historic, current, and future risk from hurricanes or tornadoes.
With First Street, you can unlock access to a variety of interactive maps to help better understand a property’s risk. To provide a fulsome understanding of a property’s wind risk, reports include 2 interactive wind maps- Current & Future Risk, and Historic Risk. View these maps by clicking Explore on the map under the corresponding section name in the Wind Risk Report or use the navigation bar to select the Wind Maps tab.
Map layers - Current & Future Risk
Year
The First Street Wind Model can determine the likelihood and speed of a wind event reaching the property in a given year, known as an annual wind likelihood, or annual probability. An annual probability is the chance of something happening at least once within a specific, singular year. First Street includes three annual probabilities: the current year, 15 years in the future, and 30 years in the future. Due to changes in the environment, the speed and likelihood projected if an extremely rare hurricane event were to occur in 15 or 30 years differ from the speed and likelihood projected if that same event occurred this year. Explore wind risk by year to understand how environmental changes impact risk.
Wind scenario
Wind scenarios describe the recurrence interval of winds. The average number of years between hurricanes or severe wind events of a certain size is the recurrence interval or return period. For example, in any given year there is a 1-in-500 (0.2%) chance that this area will experience a severe wind event. Scenarios are used to categorize the likelihood of different severities of hurricane events occurring. Lower probabilities (0.03%, 0.2%) represent stronger and faster hurricane winds that are less likely to occur, but more likely to cause greater damage.
Map layers - Historic Risk
Past Events
Wind Factor reports provide historic information on hurricane events, tornadoes, and severe storm wind events that have occurred in the county where the property is located. It also provides additional information on the most severe event within that county based on wind speed. This information is sourced from freely available government datasets that have varying levels of quality control.
Historic events come from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). It includes tornadoes and severe wind events from 1955-2022 and hurricanes and tropical storms from 1851-2022.
Note that map visuals are not available for severe thunderstorms or for hurricanes prior to 2004.
Statistics
The historic experience includes statistics for all recorded hurricanes from 2004-2022 including the estimated 3-second wind gust speed from that event near that property and the total number of properties that were impacted by the hurricane.
It also includes statistics from all recorded tornado events from 1955-2022. Tornadoes will be shown on the map as a point where the tornado hit down or a line of the tornado path. Statistics included for tornadoes are the rating based on either the Fujita or Enhanced Fujita scale (as specified in the experience) as well as the total financial $ loss in damages to the county as reportedly caused by the tornado.
Sorting
Historic events are sortable by type, date, wind speed, or properties impacted. Hurricane events and Tornado events are batched together when sorted by speed or properties impacted. For speed, hurricanes will use the estimated gust speed while tornadoes will be sorted by the rating scale. For properties impacted, hurricanes will be sorted by the total count of properties impacted in the county while tornadoes will be sorted by the $ loss in damages in the county.
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