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VO: This is what’s known as the Dry Corridor,

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covering Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras and

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Nicaragua. Over the last ten years, this historically dry

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region of Central America has been hit by the effects of climate change.

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Extreme weather, like prolonged droughts, are taking its toll

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on the region’s agriculture. Regions in the Dry Corridor

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experience severe drought during the El Niño Southern Oscillation

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cycle. For example, El Salvador has seen persistent droughts

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each year between 2012 and 2018,

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which has impacted the livelihoods of local farmers.

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Cirilo: If it continues as it is today,

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I will have to leave again because

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there is no work here. One can’t survive in

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El Salvador under these conditions.
VO: To identify which

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farmers are experiencing significant loss, local insurance providers

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combine satellite data to figure out where to direct financial

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protection. Local insurance agencies have been using NASA

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data on precipitation to get a better a picture of the climatic

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conditions in order to implement index insurance.

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Index insurance pays out benefits based on a predetermined index,

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such as the amount of rainfall in a region.
Llabres: We try to assess which are the most

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important risks for the whole country, and in many

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cases those are climate-related and are aggravated by climate change.

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That includes more severe and more frequent droughts,

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and that includes also more excessive rainfall, more excessive

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hydrological events.
VO: Assessing the impacts

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of extreme weather and individual losses all over El Salvador

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would incur an enormous operational cost. For these regions,

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that’s where satellites like TRMM and GPM can make

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a huge difference.
Llabres: When TRMM came to life a little

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more than two decades ago, it was a high quality product that we were

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now able to use to determine what happened in each

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part of the country. The market of insurance can reach people

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that it didn’t reach before, that it was too costly to reach

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before that. Now we have more than twenty years of

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satellite data from quality sources, such as NASA, including TRMM and

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GPM, and now we can actually price an insurance component,

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an insurance product, based on experience that we have collected

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through these decades, and that we will continue to collect and

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improve in the coming years.