We conducted a pre-fire assessment of post-wildfire hazards to identify, at the countywide scale, areas at risk of post-wildfire flooding and debris flows, to quantify the severity and extent of those risks within two study areas, and to identify mitigation opportunities to reduce risks. Flood and debris-flow hazards were identified countywide and present significant risks within the study areas. Several identified mitigation measures have been implemented, or are planned, to reduce the risks.

Flood frequency curves are usually highly uncertain since they are based on short data sets of measured discharges or weather conditions. To decrease the confidence intervals, an efficient bootstrap method is developed. With this method, the data set of measured discharges of the Rhine river could be extended with approximately 600 years. The study shows that flood events decrease the confidence interval of the flood frequency curve significantly, specifically in the range of large floods.

Based on stability charts proposed by Perrotti et al. (2018), preliminary assessment of stability/instability of underground quarries in soft carbonate rocks is discussed with reference at six case studies of underground artificial cavities, including three affected by sinkhole failures in the past and three in stable conditions at present. When underground quarries are suitably surveyed and mapped, a quantitative assessment of the stability conditions is possible.

Large-scale risk assessments can be improved by a more direct relation between the type of exposed building and the impact of floods. Compared to the common land-use-based approach, our model reflects heterogeneous structures and defines building-material-based vulnerability classes. The approach is particularly interesting for areas with large variations of building types, such as in developing countries and over large-scales, and how it can be used to distinguish risk in urban and rural areas.

Flood events are often complex in their origin and dynamics which should be represented in models aiming at simulating past and future events. However, it is often the case that models are designed for one specific purpose, hampering holistic flood simulations. To overcome this, we developed GLOFRIM 2.0 which allows the user to combine several models in a plug-and-play manner. It is then possible to couple models depending on the envisaged purpose and with varying complexity.

Debris flows in Great Britain have caused damage to infrastructure, buildings, and disruption to businesses and communities. This paper outlines a methodology incorporating expert judgement and environmental factors to derive a debris flow susceptibility map for Great Britain. This spatial dataset provides a useful tool for policy-makers, developers and engineers, and can support development action plans and risk reduction strategies at the regional or national scale.

In this paper, a fast monitoring and real time precursor predication method is proposed to build the early warning systems for specific landslide. The fast monitoring network in this system uses ad-hoc technology to build rapid site monitoring network consist of Beidou terminals. The real time precursor predication method based on the KF-FFT-SVM model is conducted to fulfil precursor early warning of in short time. This system improves the robust and early warning efficient of traditionaly LEWs.

Many of the rapidly expanding cities around the world are located near active tectonic faults that have not produced an earthquake in recent memory. But these faults are generally small and so most previous seismic hazard analysis has focused on large more distant faults. In this paper we show that a moderate size earthquake on a fault close to the city of Santiago in Chile has a greater impact to the city than a great earthquake on the tectonic boundary in the ocean about a 100 km away.

This paper presents AGRIDE-c, a new conceptual model for the estimation of flood damage to crops, and its application in North of Italy. The model (developped with the support of agronomists and economists by means of a what-if analysis) can support more reliable assessments of the economic effectiveness of flood risk mitigation measures, and the implementation of more resilient damage alleviation practices by farmers.

For the 11 western US States we addressed gaps in existing wildfire risk assessments that do not explicitly considered cross-boundary fire transmission among major landowners and do not identify the sources of fire for the exposed communities. Stochastic wildfire simulation outputs were post-processed in a geo-spatial framework. Our methods can be implemented across different regions of the world to inform fire management agencies decisions on the locations of future fuel management projects.

This paper presents an update of the tsunami catalogue of New Caledonia within the framework of the tsunami hazard assessment project TSUCAL. It provides 25 events for the last decade, leading to a number of 37 tsunamis triggered by earthquakes reported in New Caledonia since 1875. It is a topic of great concern for modellers looking for real case data to set up potential scenarios and decision-makers to constrain hazard management including the evacuation processes in case of a tsunami.

We developed a novel approach in using Bayesian Networks (BN) for ensemble flood forecasting in a case study in Iran. This allows fast early warning without the need for hydrological modelling. We recommend to combine precipitation ensembles with hydrological initial conditions in the BN. The number of observed flood events is low by nature for training data based methods. BN outperformed Artificial Neural Networks with good results. Future work will validate the concept in other basins.

In order to define a dry period, a threshold for wet days is usually considered to account for measurement errors and evaporation. In the present study we compare the threshold of 1 mm / day, the most commonly used, to a time varying threshold describing evapotranspiration to compare how the risk of extreme dry spells is estimated with both thresholds. Results indicate that considering a fixed threshold can underestimate extreme dry spells during the extended summer.

This work investigates the dependence between drought hazard and yield anomalies of rainfed cropping systems in the Iberian Peninsula using the copula theory. The applied methodology allows to estimate the likelihood of wheat- and barley-loss under drought conditions and a dependence among extreme values is suggested. From the decision-making point of view this study aims to contribute to the mitigation of drought-related crop-failure.

Vegetation indices based on satellite images, such as Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI), have been lately used for damaged pasture insurance. The occurrence of damage is usually defined by NDVI thresholds mainly based on Normal statistics. In this work a pasture area in Spain was delimited by MODIS images. An analysis of NDVI distributions was applied to seek for the best statistical distribution. The results show that Extreme Value distributions present better fit than Normal ones.

Several authors have shown evidence of electromagnetic measurements prior to earthquakes. However, these investigations lack a physical mechanism to support them. That is why we developed a theory that could explain many of these phenomena. Specifically, we demonstrate that the generation of microcracks in the lithosphere due to stress changes can explain and describe these electromagnetic phenomena.

This works provides a simple and fast approach to improve tsunami warning systems in the near field. A color-coded warning map is produced almost instantaneously after the seismic information is received. Time is crucial in the near field case, for instance, the tsunami waves generated in the chilean trench arrives at the coastline around 10–15 minutes. Seismic information takes 3–5 minutes to be ready, we produece a first warning map after 6 minutes of the earthquake origin time.

Rockfall boulders can travel long distances down slope and it is important to predict how far to prevent fatalities. A comparison of earthquake data from New Zealand during summer and full-scale rockfall experiments in the same soil during winter shows that during dry seasons boulders travel further downslope because the soil is harder. When using predictive tools, engineers and geologists should take soil conditions (and seasonal variations thereof) in to account.

This paper provides an approach to apply data assimilation method to stability analysis and parameter update and feedback in a landslide. The experiment is implemented by particle filter algorithm. The result FS sequence of TRIGRS output decreases continuously with time and the assimilation can effectively correct the FS of the model output. The RMSD of FS indicates the assimilation results can correct the estimation of TRIGRS output close to actual observations.

In 2005, northern Pakistan was hit by a 7.6 magnitude earthquake. The epicenter was located near capital of the Pakistani territory of Azad Kashmir and also affected Pakistan's Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province and Indian-administered Jammu and Kashmir region. It was believed that the local topography might have significant role in direct and indirect damage in the region. This study shows that the local topography played significant role in the earthquake induced damage in the region.

Climate change and global warming scenario increase the odds of worsening drought. Therefore, precise characterization and regional monitoring of drought are the major challenge. In this paper, we provide a new way to formulate and improve temporal data of precipitation for the Standardized Drought Index (SDI) type tools. Results show that improved estimates are good candidates for modelling and monitoring hydrological drought with more precision.

Flood forecasting and simulation in semiarid regions are always poor, and a single criterion assessment provides limited information for decision making. Here, we propose a multicriterion assessment framework combining the absolute relative error, the flow partitioning and the confidence interval to assess the most striking feature of an event-based flood––the peak flow. Our results show that the accepted rates of flood events improve a lot under the multicriterion assessment framework.

This paper investigates why earthquake insurance in California is so unpopular despite a significant risk. For that, homeowners’ behavior has been investigated based on the evolution of the earthquake insurance industry in California since its premises. This study shows that most of homeowners disregard earthquake insurance because the premium amount is too high and not because they underestimate the risk. We conclude that new insurance solutions must be designed to fill this protection gap.

It is necessary to do some prevention study of landslide hazard like the early warning and deformation prediction. This research proposes a new strategy to predict displacement of the landslide. Results confirm the accuracy and effectiveness of this method in displacement prediction, which can provide assistance in early risk assessment and landslide forecasting.

The paper study investigates the use of measured water levels to reduce uncertainties bounds of a two-dimensional hydrodynamic model output. Uncertainty assessment generally is not reported in practice due to the lack of best practices and too wide uncertainty bounds. Hence, a novel method to reduce the bounds by constraining the model parameter, mainly roughness, is presented. The operational practitioners as well as researchers benefits from the study in the field of flood risk management.

This work investigates the formation of a hailstorm over the Tropical Bolivian Andes. Using the WRF atmospheric model, we are able to numerically reconstruct it and we assess the main factors (mountains, lake and surface heating) in the storm formation. We propose physical mechanisms that have the potential to improve the forecasting of similar events; which are known to have a big impact over the Bolivian Altiplano, especially the region near Titicaca lake.

This paper make deep evluation of a new mthod for modelling site amplification factor. Though implement this method and make simulation for different cases, we can find that this method show better performance than the previous method and JMA Report. We will better understanding the advantage and disadvantage of this method, although there are some problems needed to consider carefully and to be solved, it shows good potential to be used in the future earthquake early waring system in the world.

Large positive and negative sea level anomalies at the coast of the Mediterranean Sea are produced by cyclones moving along the Mediterranean storm track, which are mostly generated in the western Mediterranean. The wind around the cyclone center is the main cause of sea level anomalies when a shallow water fetch is present. The inverse barometer effect produces a positive anomaly near the cyclone pressure minimum and a negative anomaly at the opposite side of the Mediterranean Sea.

A method for risk mitigation of secondary lahars, triggered by violent rainfalls, is proposed as alternative to works for their containment or deviation, that could cause future disasters. It is based on the controlled generation of small lahars as a result of collapse of frail dams by backfill, forming momentary ponds as in natural cases. LLUNPIY verifies by simulation path, velocity, thickness, erosion of lahars, that could be produced; a complex case study for Vascún Valley, Ecuador is shown.

This study aims to identify clusters of landslide events within a global database that are triggered by the same rainfall event. Results show that 14 % of all studied landslide events are actually part of a landslide cluster consisting of at least 10 events. However, in a more regional analysis this number ranges from 30 % for the West Coast of North America to 3 % in the Himalaya Region. These findings provide an improved understanding for managing landslide mitigations on a larger scale.

The work carried out for this study is part of a collaborative research program studying the impact of ground hazards on transportation infrastructure in Canada. The focus of the paper is the testing and application of a new simulation technique which can model the movement of falling rock material. These initial tests show that our simulation technique is capable of re-producing material accumulations from rockfall events which occurred above a section of railway in British Columbia, Canada.

On 8 August 2017, a Ms 7.0 earthquake struck the Jiuzhaigou region of Sichuan Province which triggered numerous landslides. In this study, a landslide susceptibility map was generated by using an integrated weighted index model. Results indicated that the integrated model has superior fitting performance and predictive capability. We expect that the generated landslide susceptibility map can be served as the scientific basis to mitigate hazards of the earthquake-triggered landslides.

Tsunami can be destructive when it inundates the coastal areas. In recent years, the positive role of coral reefs in mitigating the tsunami waves has aroused the attentions among the scholars. We therefore investigate the tsunami wave interaction with a reef profile via a sophisticated numerical model. We find that the low-lying coastal areas, fringed by coral reefs with milder back-reef beaches and smaller lagoons, are less susceptible to the coastal inundation during a tsunami event.

In this study the SMC-Flood Database for the municipalities of the Mediterranean coast of mainland Spain is presented. This database has enabled the reconstruction of 3008 cases of flooding on a municipal scale between 1960 and 2015. The data analysis reveals a growing trend in the frequency and area affected by floods. The main novelty lies in the fact that we have detected a clear latitudinal gradient of growing intensity and severity of floods with a north–south direction.