Clusters of severe windstorms threaten solvency in the (re-)insurance industry. Risk management is made highly uncertain due to so few clusters of severe storms in the past few decades. This research brought together a wide variety of historical storm damage information spanning the past few centuries in Europe to increase our knowledge of clustering of damaging storms. Clustering was found to increase with more severe storms, with weaker signs of more clustering off the main storm track.

The research presented in this manuscript introduces the theory and methods from the hazard function analysis literature to address the probabilistic analysis of natural hazards whose magnitudes show evidence of increasing over time. To the authors' knowledge, this is the first research article to apply the extremely well-developed field of hazard function theory to the problem of nonstationary natural hazards.

An extreme rainfall-producing mesoscale convective system (MCS) associated with the Changma front in south-eastern South Korea was investigated using observational data. The aim of the present study is to analyze and better understand the synoptic and mesoscale environment and the behaviour of the MCS causing natural hazards over South Korea.

Many urban areas experience both fluvial and pluvial floods, thus this study aims to analyse fluvial and pluvial flood hazards as well as combined pluvial and fluvial flood hazards. This combined fluvial–pluvial flood hazard analysis is performed in a tropical environment for Can Tho city in the Mekong Delta. The final results are probabilistic hazard maps, showing the maximum inundation caused by floods of different magnitudes along with an uncertainty estimation.

Heat-related risk analysis is based on outdoor climates; however, humans are mostly exposed to indoor climates. A novel heat-related risk concept is developed, which includes exposition to the indoor climate. An exemplary calculation of heat-related mortality reveals that the influence of building physics better explains the variability in the risk data. Simplified building models can be used for indoor hazard calculation as long as the main non-linear effects of the buildings are included.

We present a survey on subjective heat stress experienced by 323 residents of Karlsruhe, Germany, during heat waves in summer 2013. The results show that subjective heat stress permeates daily life, and measures to cope with heat are performed within the scope of action in daily life. Various individual, social, and environmental factors influence the individual heat stress level. For societal adaptation, further research is necessary on how daily life enables or limits coping with heat.

When calculating the risk of railway or road users being killed by a natural hazard, one has to calculate a temporal spatial probability, i.e. the probability of a vehicle being in the path of the falling mass when the mass falls, or the expected number of hit vehicles in the case of an event. This paper discusses different methods used to calculate this probability, in particular regarding the consideration of the dimensions of the falling mass and of the vehicles.

One of the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) products, the Terrestrial Water Storage Anomaly (TWSA), was used for assessing large-scale flood risk. The efficacy of the methodology was evaluated over the continental USA. The method exhibits higher skill in predicting the large-area, long-duration floods, especially during the summer season.

This study presents a systematic review of 128 papers that apply multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) tools to flood problems, aiming to provide an overall picture of what has motivated researchers in 37 different countries over the past 2 decades. A wide range of applications were identified, highlighting the utility of MCDM as a decision support tool in all stages of the flood management process.

A method for semi-automatic landslide detection and mapping is presented and tested using a very high-resolution satellite image, sensed 3 days after a major damaging landslide event that occurred in Madeira Island (20 February 2010). The testing is developed in a 15 km² wide area, where 95 % of the number of landslides scars is detected by this approach.