Bermudian-based Aeolus Capital Management Ltd and Italian-headquartered Risk Engineering and Development have launched a research collaboration focused on the assessment of earthquake risk.

The work, led by Pete Dailey, head of research at Aeolus, will be a quantitative study looking at how a key aspect of earthquake risk is represented in available catastrophe models.

Dr Dailey said: “Aeolus Research is excited to launch this partnership with Professor [Paolo] Bazzurro and the Red team based in Pavia, Italy.

“Earthquakes naturally occur in sequences, some persisting for weeks, months or even years. While catastrophe models have considered temporal clustering of earthquakes explicitly in their models for regions like the New Madrid zone in the central US, recent occurrences of sequences in New Zealand, Italy and Turkey have provided additional data for the scientific community to analyse.

“The partnership with the Red team will ensure our proprietary risk models continue to account for earthquake risk in a complete and holistic way.”

Lead collaborator Professor Bazzurro is the former head of Air Worldwide’s (now Verisk Analytics’) earthquake modelling team.

He said: "This is an important study into the effects of including sequences into earthquake risk estimates in California. We look forward to our partnership with Aeolus to help improve our understanding of earthquake risk."