David Wood, JBA Risk Management & Jochen Papenbrock, NVIDIA: Showing the world how to revolutionise modelling (388)

How can AI weather models improve the accuracy and scale of catastrophe modelling? Matthew Grant is joined by David Wood, Managing Director at JBA Risk Management, and Jochen Papenbrock, Head of Financial Technology (EMEA) at NVIDIA, to explore how accelerated computing is unlocking new ways to simulate and manage flood risk. JBA has long been a pioneer in flood modelling, while NVIDIA’s GPU technology has helped drive the recent breakthroughs in AI and generative modelling. Together, they discuss how high-resolution simulations, new ensemble methods and open-source tools are pushing the limits of what’s possible in climate and catastrophe analytics. Key Talking Points: The early bet – how JBA’s adoption of GPU computing over a decade ago made national-scale flood mapping possible From gaming to GenAI – how NVIDIA's evolution from graphics to AI led to the development of physics-informed weather models Ensemble power – why running 1,000+ simulations helps capture more extremes than the historic record ever could Event sets reimagined – how AI models are enabling richer, more diverse flood scenarios for Europe and beyond Real-time relevance – the potential to use AI models to simulate how a flood might unfold, as it’s happening Making AI usable – how Earth-2 Studio and open-source frameworks are opening up generative models to catastrophe modellers Proving value – how NVIDIA and JBA worked together to quantify the benefits of faster, more flexible modelling approaches Looking ahead – why cross-sector collaboration will be essential to turn acceleration into real-world impact If you like what you’re hearing, please leave us a review on whichever platform you use or contact Matthew Grant on LinkedIn.  Sign up to the InsTech newsletter for a fresh view on the world every Wednesday morning.