Crop hail damage: insurance loss assessment using remote sensing

Abstract

The project focussed on designing a remote sensing data acquisitions strategy that will suitably respond to the requirements of broadacre crop hail damage mapping and assessment. Current field based hail damage assessment practices are both time and labour intensive. This new strategy required multi-stage and multi-source data acquisition to be performed within specific time, spatial resolution and cost limitations. Integration with a Geographic Information Systems (GIS) database is also essential to interface with an interactive administrative system. Remote sensing and GIS provides an economically viable technique for the recording, correlation, analysis and judicious evaluation of hail damage loss accuracy, consistency and creating a relational database. Value adding is realisable through modelling storm damage and past claims information for risk analysis scenarios to provide planning and crop management information to farmers. Information can also be provided to developers; land use planners; prospective buyers; insurance brokers and financial lending agencies. This technique’s attributes will enable a commercial Internet claims management platform to be established. This paper reports on results that encompass the strategy; spectral signature evaluation from a multiple hail damage simulations; and hail damage assessment using remotely sensed imagery.