Floods affect many communities and cause a large amount of damage worldwide. Since we choose to live in natural flood plains and are unable to prevent all floods, a system of insurance and reinsurance was set up. For these institutes to not fail, estimates are required of the frequency of large-scale flood events. We explore a new method to obtain a large catalogue of synthetic, spatially coherent, large-scale river discharge events, using a recent (gridded) European discharge data set.

Long-term georeferenced time series showed spatiotemporal variations in large fires (LF ≥ 100 ha) throughout the French Mediterranean with 21 % of the total LF burned area occurring on surface previously burned. The region was impacted up to five to six times by recurrent LFs, the east experiencing fewer but larger LFs despite fire weather conditions decreasing eastwards. The efficiency of fire management has improved but LF outbreaks during extreme weather conditions remain a major concern.

Convective systems producing severe winds occasionally affect Europe during wintertime and the majority of these storms develop along well-defined cold fronts of extratropical cyclones. However, on 3 January 2014, a storm formed in a postfrontal air mass over western Europe. This study analyses the prevailing environmental conditions and the predictability of this storm. Our results reveal the difficulty of forecasting cold-season convective storms when they are not associated with a cold front.

The Karakoram Highway (KKH) is an important physical connection between Pakistan and China. Landslides have been a major threat to its stability since its construction. After the announcement of the China–Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), KKH has had more importance. Geoscientists from research institutions in both countries are assessing landslide hazard and risk along the highway. In a PhD project, this paper will be followed by a detailed analysis of mass movements along the highway.

In recent years, earthquakes have been occurring in Korea where no earthquakes occurred in the past. Appropriate response planning using simulations in countries with less earthquake risk management experiences are needed. It is especially important to evaluate earthquake damage financially. This paper is a model study for urban earthquake risk management and meaningfully generates basic data for a cost benefit analysis of a disaster prevention plan by financial evaluation of earthquake damage.

This paper evaluates the effect of surge water level reduction due to land surface characteristics when assessing flood impacts at global scales. Our results show that uncertainties due to not accounting for water attenuation are of similar magnitude to the uncertainties regarding the total amount of sea-level rise expected by 2100, thus highlighting the need for better understanding of the spatial and temporal variation of water levels across floodplains.

A state-of-the-art regional climate model ensemble for Europe is investigated for extreme precipitation intensities. The models poorly reproduce short duration events of less than a few hours. Further, there is poor connection to some known hotspots for extreme cases. The model performance is much improved at 12 h durations. Projected future increases scale with seasonal mean temperature change, within a range from a few percent to over 10 percent per degree Celsius.

This paper investigates the formation of the Mediterranean hurricane that developed between Balearic Islands and Sardinia in October 1996, with a particular focus on the influence of sea surface temperature. We show that increased sea surface temperatures lead to greater probabilities of appearance and a greater strength of the resulting hurricane, suggesting that the processes for Mediterranean hurricanes at steady state are very similar to tropical cyclones.

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.

The main damage characteristics have been reported in Nepal caused by the 2015 Nepal earthquake but not in China. Our investigations suggested that damage caused by the earthquake in Tibet varies with intensity, amount of rock weakened by previous movement, steepness of slope, and lithology. The damage shows directional features mainly developed in the N-trending rifts in southern Tibet. The earthquake-induced landslides and collapses generally occurred where previous ones had taken place.

We study rockfall hazard to a town in an earthquake-prone area, where large trailer-truck-sized boulders are scattered downslope above the town. Mapping boulder locations and sizes (in the field and in past aerial photos) and calculating their predicted trajectories downslope 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 rockfall.

The potential of W-band radar reflectivity to improve the quality of analyses and forecasts of heavy precipitation events in the Mediterranean area is investigated. The 1D + 3DVar assimilation method has been adapted to assimilate the W-band reflectivity in the Météo-France kilometre-scale NWP model AROME. The results suggest that the joint assimilation of W-band reflectivity and horizontal wind profiles lead to a slight improvement of moisture analyses and rainfall precipitation forecasts.

The study reports on the impact of the assimilation of wind data from airborne Doppler cloud-profiling radar in a kilometre-scale NWP model 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 period. In addition, the impact of the length of the assimilation window in a 3h-3DVar assimilation system is investigated.

We introduce a new prediction-oriented method for hazard assessment of volcaniclastic debris flows, based on multiple models. We apply our procedure to a case study of the 1955 Atenquique flow, using three widely used depth-averaged models. Depending on how it is looked at, the exercise provides useful information in either model selection or data inversion. Connecting inverse problems and model uncertainty represents a fundamental challenge in the future development of multi-model solvers.

Mitigating landslide risk requires information on landslide hazards on a suitable scale to inform decisions. We develop simple rules to identify landslide hazards and the probability of being hit by a landslide, then test their performance using six existing landslide inventories from recent earthquakes. We find that the best rules are "minimize your maximum look angle to the skyline" and "avoid steep (> 10˚) channels with many steep (> 40˚) areas that are upslope".

Atmospheric ice accretion caused by freezing precipitation leads to severe damage and failure of buildings and infrastructure. This study investigates projected changes to extreme ice loads used to design infrastructure over North America for future periods of specified global mean temperature change using a Canadian regional climate model. Increases in ice accretion for latitudes higher than 40° N are substantial and would have clear implications for future building and infrastructure design.

We propose in this study a fundamentally new approach for the definition of minimum rainfall required for the initiation of landslides based on satellite-derived antecedent rainfall estimates directly coupled with data on surface susceptibility for landslides. We apply our approach in the western branch of the East African Rift and provide first regional rainfall thresholds for landsliding in tropical Africa.

This study fully considers the characteristics of expressways in mountain areas. The catchment area is considered a prediction unit. The method of slope division is improved, and a method of improving the parameters in the model is proposed. Comparison and analysis with actual observation data show that the method of soil and water loss prediction adopted in this paper has less error and higher prediction accuracy than other models and can satisfy prediction requirements.

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.

This research work of this paper completes the authors' activity in the Military Emergencies Unit of Spain in responding to the problem of slope instabilities and how to predict them in the case of heavy rains. This work completes the work of stabilization and stresses made by torrential rains in the south of Spain. The results have been satisfactory.

Livestock and their owners in the Qinghai–Tibetan Plateau has long suffered from snow disaster. In order to help the local herder community better prepare for potential loss, we developed a probabilistic disaster-event simulation approach, from which livestock loss induced by a snow disaster with specific intensity and local prevention capacity could be predicted. By using this method, we managed to estimate snow disaster duration, livestock loss rate, and number at different return periods.

A mega-flood in 1998 caused tremendous losses in China and triggered major policy adjustments in flood-risk management. This paper rethinks these policy adjustments and discusses how China should adapt to newly emerging flood challenges. We suggest that China needs novel flood-risk management approaches to address the new challenges from rapid urbanization and climate change. These include risk-based urban planning and a coordinated water governance system.

This article discusses how Nepal's development, landslide risk and geopolitics are intertwined as the country seeks to expand its road networks. However, rural villages adjacent to major roads have developed their own network of poorly constructed rural roads, which are likely to increase environmental and socioeconomic risks associated with roadside landslides. We base our observations on research conducted over a decade in Nepal, with reference to new research on roads and landslides.

La Paz, Bolivia, experiences frequent damaging landslides. We quantify creep before and after the city’s largest modern landslide using spaceborne InSAR. Creep of ancient landslide deposits increased in rate and extent following failure and extended into adjacent intact materials. Accelerated steady-state creep reflects complex post-failure stress redistribution. Landslide risk in La Paz, which is underlain by many large ancient landslides, may be even greater than previously thought.

Flood risk management relies on assessments performed using flood loss models of different complexities. We compared the performances of expert-based and empirical damage models on three major flood events in northern Italy. Our findings suggest that multivariate models have better potential to provide reliable damage estimates if extensive ancillary characterisation data are available. Expert-based approaches are better suited for transferability compared to empirically based approaches.

We want to know which areas are prone to landslides and where pipelines are more unsafe. Through a model, we determined that 33.18 % and 40.46 % of the slopes in the study are were in high-hazard and extremely high-hazard areas, respectively. The number and length of pipe segments in the highly vulnerable and extremely vulnerable areas accounted for about 12 % of the total. In general, the pipeline risk within Qingchuan and Jian'ge counties was relatively high.

We mapped – for the first time – the probability of occurrence of drought over Spain, with the overriding aim of improving current drought assessment, management and mitigation measures, and strategies across the region. Spatially, our estimations suggest a higher probability of extreme drought events in southern and central areas of Spain compared to northern and eastern regions. Nevertheless, there are strong differences among drought indices and drought timescales.