US Wildfire Model

KatRisk US Wildfire is a fully probabilistic catastrophe model for the contiguous United States, built for insurers and reinsurers who need to move beyond historical losses and static wildfire hazard zones. A 50,000-year stochastic catalogue of ignition points and fire sizes, built from historical fire and meteorological data and focused on fires larger than 1,000 acres, is run through Technosylva's physics-based fire-spread engine across fuel and terrain on a 30 m grid. The result is roughly 22 million simulated fire footprints, with embers, spotting and urban conflagration modelled explicitly; the urban conflagration component was developed in conjunction with CAL FIRE and PG&E. KatRisk describes the fuel inputs as proprietary fuel layers; its parent company Technosylva builds its proprietary fuels from LiDAR, satellite imagery, UAV data and ground-truth points.

Smoke is simulated for every event as a following peril, using biomass-driven smoke generation and the Air Quality Index, so off-perimeter exposure is captured. Damage functions conditioned on rate of spread and flame length, refined by building and neighbourhood modifiers such as roof type, vents, vegetation clearance and wildland-urban interface location, produce average annual loss, exceedance probability curves, event and year loss tables and return-period hazard and loss at property, account and portfolio scale. Ignition correlation is driven by the same stochastic precipitation dataset as KatRisk's flood model, and climate scenarios are supported. The model was validated against the 2025 Palisades and Eaton fires. It ships in SpatialKat 7.0 (user interface and API), and Juniper Re licensed it in September 2026.