This research aimed to assess the tsunami flow velocity and height reduction produced by a planned elevated road spanned parallel to the coast of Banda Aceh called Banda Aceh Outer Ring Road (BORR). Cornell Multi-Grid Coupled Tsunami Model (COMCOT) was used to simulate eight scenarios of the tsunami. One of them was based on the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami. Two magnitudes of earthquake were used, that is, 8.5 and 9.15 Mw. The elevated road is potential to mitigate impacts of future tsunamis.

Flood defences have the potential to be integrated with many other functions. While assessments of multifunctional dikes are usually conservative, using a probabilistic framework allows for synergies to be integrated and the risks to be made explicit. This change leads to a better perspective on the protection level of a flood defence and the effectiveness of reinforcements, allowing for better implementation of multifunctional elements on flood defences.

A methodology to optimize the design of an offshore tsunami network array is presented, allowing placement of sensors to be used in a Early Tsunami Warning System framework. The method includes multiple tsunami parameters as a measure of the predictive accuracy through a single cost function. The resulting network performance was tested against an historical event, suggesting that having such a network in place could have provided meaningful information for the hazard assessment.

The research has been done to assess the performance of relative positioning over long baselines in determining the accuracy of site velocities from repeated short session GPS measurements. GPS repeated measurements were generated from the IGS data, and the results were compared with PPP derived findings. Major outcome of this study is that relative positioning over long baselines produces similar accuracies to PPP. A newly proposed refinement method also improves the available PPP accuracy.

Rainfall Intensity–Duration–Frequency (IDF) curves are used as the basis for the design, management, and operation of water resources infrastructure at local and regional scales. Given anticipated intensification of the hydrological cycle with anthropogenic global warming, quantitative information on the future extreme rainfall hazard is needed by practitioners. This paper analyses projected changes in IDF curves based on high-resolution regional climate model simulations over North America.

Assessing the risk of complex systems to natural hazards is an important and challenging problem. In today's socio-technological world, the connections and interdependencies between exposed elements are crucial. These complex relations call for a paradigm shift in collective risk assessment. This two-part paper proposes a new holistic approach to assess the risk of complex systems based on Graph Theory. Part II presents an application to a pilot study in Mexico City.

The study integrates tsunami hazards that create risk into: hazard-product risk and hazard-affected risk. Consistent with different factors evaluated for these two risk dimensions, different spatial distributions between them can be formed. The study recommends tsunami shelter accessibility to be enhanced where hazard-product risk is large and where hazard-affected risk is high in a different and targeted way. The tsunami risk situation’s complexity in coastal port cities makes this interesting.

Assessing the risk of complex systems to natural hazards is an important and challenging problem. In today’s socio-technological world, the connections and interdependencies between exposed elements are crucial. These complex relations call for a paradigm shift in collective risk assessment. This two-part paper proposes a new holistic approach to assess the risk of complex systems based on Graph Theory. Part I presents the approach and discusses how it can be used to more thoroughly assess risk.

Results indicate that 2071–2099 will face the most severe droughts, with the highest frequency and longest duration. In terms of spatial distribution, drought hazards in north China will be greater than in south China, especially the non-monsoon region. Comparing the two scenarios, drought hazards from RCP8.5 are higher than that from RCP4.5, i.e., higher frequency, longer duration of drought and more significant drying trends. These results provide a reference for adaption and reduction.

Flood maps can help stakeholders and the public understand their flood risk. We evaluated the quality of publicly-accessible flood maps in Canadian communities designated as flood risk areas. We found that most (62 %) are low-quality (meeting less than half of the criteria) and the highest score was 78 % (7 of 9 criteria met). Canada must make a more concerted effort to produce high-quality flood maps to support its international commitment to disaster risk reduction.

Field surveys after major disastrous earthquakes have shown that poor performance of buildings in earthquake affected areas is the leading cause of human fatalities and economic losses. The evaluation of seismic fragility for existing building stocks has become a crucial issue due to the frequent occurrence of earthquakes in the last decades. They are required for the estimation of fatalities and monetary losses due to structural damage in destructive natural disasters like earthquakes.

A methodology is proposed for the quantitative risk assessment for roadways subjected to rockfalls, retaining wall failures, slow moving landslides, and coastal erosion induced failures. It includes the calculation of the probability of occurrence of each hazard with a given level, based on an extensive collection of field data, and its association with the consequences. The latter were assessed considering the road damage repair cost for each level, in terms of a fixed Unit Cost.

We study rockfall hazard to a town below a cliff in an earthquake prone area. Large trailer-truck size boulders are scattered down slope above town. Mapping boulder locations and sizes (in the field and in past aerial photos) and calculating their predicted trajectories down slope using computer simulation yielded a hazard map for rockfall impact. hazard is reduced where slope angle is below 10°. Dating rockfalls coincides with past earthquakes and predicts probability for future rockfalls.

In recent years, several valuable nature reserves in Belgium have been severely damaged by wildfires. In order to optimize the risk management and get prepared for a possibly increasing number of such events, a first wildfire risk map is developed for Belgium, based on data that was obtained from the government and newspaper articles.

Long-term geo-referenced time series showed spatio-temporal variations of large fires (LF ≥ 100 ha) throughout the French Mediterranean with 21 % of the total LF burned area occurring on a surface previously burned. The region was impacted up to 5–6 times by recurrent LF, the East experiencing fewer but larger LF despite fire weather conditions decreasing eastwards. The efficiency of fire management emerged in early 1990s but LF outbreak during extreme weather conditions remains of major concern.

It is necessary to analyze the weight of multi factors on the risk consequence of dam break. When the number of influencing factors exceeds 10 or more, the analysis of its weight will become very difficult. In this manuscript, the cloud model, an artificial intelligence calculation method, is used to transform the subjective factors into a large number of data for the improved entropy weight method. The result is objective and reasonable, providing a new way of analyzing multi factor weights.

Climate adaptation of deltas is a hot topic given their high population density. We found that measures within the embanked floodplains of the Rhine delta cannot compensate for plausible increases in river discharge and sea level rise, except large-scale floodplain lowering. Measures located in state-owned areas are relatively effective, which would simplify decision making. Natural management of the land greatly improves biodiversity, while flood safety effects were limited.

To assess the impacts of the eastern route of the South-to-North Water Diversion Project (ER-SNWDP) of China on water-receiving area’s floods and waterlogging, a coupled 1D/2D hydrodynamic model is built, taking Nansi Lake Basin as an example. Some impacts especially for emergency operations were analyzed, and selected implications are presented for the integrated management of large scale interbasin water diversions.

We investigated the spatiotemporal characteristics of the landslide and debris flow hazards in Shaanxi Province and quantified the relationships between the occurrence rates of the two hazards and their influencing factors, including antecedent rainfall amount, rainfall duration, rainfall intensity, terrain slope, land cover type and soil type. Rainfall amount, duration, and intensity, and slope are the dominant factors controlling slope stability across this region.

This article is expected to be of great interest to the broad geoscience community. The work builds on current regional climate modelling, numerical weather prediction, and hydrological modelling applications in the Arabian Peninsula – a hyper-arid environment with a vulnerable infrastructure to frequent extreme weather and flood events.

The study reports on the impact of the assimilation of wind data from airborne Doppler cloud-profiling radar in a kilometre-scale NWP system on predicting heavy precipitation events in the Mediterranean area. The positive impact of the assimilation of such data is particularly evidenced for a heavy precipitation event and results are slightly encouraging over a 45-day cycled period. Besides, the impact of the length of the assimilation window in a 3DVar assimilation system is investigated.

This work evaluates the effects of the terrestrial warming in the Inner Delta of Niger (Mali) by the analysis of the Land Surface Temperature (LST) transition and the Spatial Transformation process (STP). Results show an important increase of the temperature while determining an extension of moderately warm areas at the same time a decrease of the warmest areas until to determine volcanic hazards areas (Faguibine Lake). Thus, this work provides a useful contribution to the terrestrial warming.

A longstanding problem in avalanche science is to understand why slow moving avalanches exert large pressures on buildings. To understand this phenomenon we propose that avalanche interaction with a rigid structure must be divided into two separate regimes: a flow regime and a pile-up regime. In the flow regime, snow does not accumulate behind the obstacle. We show why the accumulation of avalanche snow behind a structure can lead to immense forces that must be considered in mitigation.

Wenjia gully is a typical gully-type debris flow, which has a large-scale catchment and great hazard risk to the local people. Based on the monitoring data for almost six years until now, the characteristic of debris-flow triggering parameters (pore pressure and rainfall) have been analyzed, especially the relationship to debris flow occurrences or not. Then, a combined threshold has been presented and tested in order to provide a method for safeguarding the population in the region.

The present study describes an approach for the assessment of beach accretion/erosion, based on the joint use of data analysis, statistical methods and one-line numerical modeling. A chain method is proposed, based on the joint analysis of field data, statistical tools and numerical modeling. The coastline morphology has been examined through interannual field data, such as aerial photographs, plane-bathymetric surveys, seabed characterization.

First applications of ANYCaRE Experiment revealed that multi-model impact-based outputs help forecasters and civil protection to shape a holistic view of the situation and enhance their confidence on specific emergency activities to be decided and communicated. This interdisciplinary work is conducted in the frame of ANYWHERE European project that aims to provide institutions across Europe with a decision-support tool to better anticipate and respond to extreme weather and climate events.

This paper focused on the indirect economic losses caused by the Wenchuan earthquake in 2008, evaluated the progress of restoration and reconstruction based on night-time light Images. Results show that the GDP has a quadratic function relationship with the total night-time lights under normal conditions, and the economy of the disaster area after the earthquake showed unstable and turbulent development. This research can provide basis for macro-control of earthquake recovery and reconstruction.

Typhoon Hato was one of the most damaging natural disaster events in the Western Pacific region in 2017. It caused the the worst flooding in Macau since its instrumental records began in 1925. We present a high-resolution survey map recording inundation depths and distances at 278 sites in Macau. We provide a series of inundation maps under different tidal and sea levels. The maps highlight adaptive strategies are certainly required in order to keep up with the pace of rising sea level.

In the framework of the NATO Science for Peace and Security Program, we increased the knowledge about the geohazards affecting the Enguri hydroelectrical plant (SW Caucasus, Georgia). At 2 km from the dam, active deformation (2–5 cm/y) affects a slope facing the water reservoir. Our field, seismological and numerical analyses show that the worst scenario is represented by seismic shaking with a local Peak Ground Acceleration capable of generating an unstable rock volume of up to 48 ± 12 * 10⁶ m³.