Highlighting Hidden Property Damage with the AerisWeather API

Hail damage in particular causes more than $10 billion in damage in the USA each year, making it one of the most physically destructive weather events. An often-fatal risk to agricultural assets like livestock and crops, hail poses a potential for significant damage to residential and commercial businesses as well. Unlike with livestock and crops, however, hail damage to homes and other buildings is not always encountered right away.

One of the largest claims categories in property risk and insurance is hail damage.

A hail-damaged shingle might lead to gradual water ingress that goes unnoticed for months. Old damage from a heavy storm laden with hailstones may be misattributed to a more recent severe storm. By nature, hail damage often occurs in hard-to-view or or hard-to-reach areas – and on top of being hard to find, it can also be difficult to pinpoint exactly when the damage occurred. For insurance claims, this makes it challenging to attribute a loss to any particular cause or weather event.

Demetrius Gray, CEO of WeatherCheck, learned of these challenges firsthand while working as a storm contractor using the limited data available to him to watch the weather and follow resulting business opportunities. Discovering customers during that time was a challenging process, requiring numerous and consistent face-to-face interactions.

When Gray later started his own roofing company, he graduated from relying on common public sources of weather data to identify damaged properties after realizing that better weather data could remove time and ambiguity from the entire damage-to-repair process.

Louisville, KY is home to several large insurance companies, making it a natural location to launch WeatherCheck. The company’s vision was to fundamentally change how property owners and insurance and mortgage companies evaluated and responded to property damage. Continuously seeking more detailed and accurate sources of data, WeatherCheck turned to AerisWeather as a critical input into their proprietary models for locating possible damage from weather events.

Integrating the AerisWeather API immediately delivered a pipeline of ground truth weather data into WeatherCheck’s rich analyses conducted by a team of weather scientists, AI professors, climatologists, cloud computing engineers, and claims analysts. These reports would empower them to safeguard investments for a variety of clients.

In partnering with AerisWeather, WeatherCheck now quickly identifies areas of damage potential and delivers scalable, highly accurate assessments across the United States. This removes the need for investment-heavy resources, such as a private weather database and forecasting engine, and allows WeatherCheck to focus on saving insurance companies, contractors, and property owners time and money by reducing fraud, highlighting underlying damage, and pinpointing areas of business need.