Fair Pricing of Weather Derivatives

This paper proposes a consistent benchmark approach to price weather derivatives. The growth optimal portfolio to price weather derivatives. The growth optimal portfolio is used as numeraire such that all benchmarked fair price processes are martingales. No measure transformation is needed for fair pricing. Since weather derivatives are traded in an incomplete market setting, standard hedging based pricing methods cannot be applied. For weather derivative payoffs that are independent from the value of the growth optimal portfolio it is shown that the classical actuarial pricing methodology is a particular case of the fair pricing concept. A discrete time model is constructed to approximate historical weather characteristics assuming Gaussian residuals. For particular weather derivatives their fair prices are derived.