The present work describes the interaction between waves and currents utilizing a coupled ADCIRC+SWAN model for the very severe cyclonic storm Hudhud which made landfall at Visakhapatnam on the east coast of India in October 2014. Model-computed wave and surge heights were validated with measurements near the landfall point. An increase of ≈0.2 m in H_s was observed with the inclusion of model currents.

Early warning is essential for protecting people and mitigating damage in case of flood events. To gain more knowledge, surveys were taken after the 2002 and the 2013 floods in Germany. Results show that early warning and preparedness improved substantially. However, there is still room for further improvement, which needs to be triggered mainly by effective risk and emergency communication.

We discuss the challenges and limitations of surveying rock slope failures using 3-D reconstruction from images acquired from street view imagery (SVI) and processed with modern photogrammetric workflows. Despite some clear limitations and challenges, we demonstrate that this original approach could help obtain preliminary 3-D models of an area without on-field images. Furthermore, the pre-failure topography can be obtained for sites where it would not be available otherwise.

Floods cause damage to people, buildings and infrastructures. Due to their usual location near rivers, water utilities are particularly exposed; in case of flood, the inundation of the facility can damage equipment and cause power outages. Such impact lead to costly repairs and disruption of service affecting indirectly people outside the inundated area. In this work a method to estimate the impact of floods on a water distribution system is introduced and applied to a case study.

This paper provides a full range of possible future sea levels on a regional scale, since it includes extreme, but possible, contributions to sea level change from dynamical mass loss from the Greenland and Antarctica ice sheets. In contrast to the symmetric distribution used in the IPCC report, it is found that an asymmetric distribution toward high sea level change values locally can increase the mean sea level by 1.8 m this century.

Unmanned aerial vehicles can provide digital elevation models and orthomosaics of high spatio-temporal resolution to enable landslide monitoring. The study examines the additional value that morphological attribute of openness can provide to surface deformation combining with image-cross-correlation functions alongside DEM differencing. The paper demonstrates the automated quantification of a landslide's motion over time with implications for the wider interpretation of landslide kinematics.

This article examines the international policy and institutional frameworks for response to natural and man-made disasters occurring in the Danube basin and the Tisza sub-basin, two transnational basins. Monitoring and response to these types of incidents have historically been managed separately. We suggest that these distinctions are counterproductive, outdated, and ultimately flawed, illustrate some of the specific gaps in the Danube and the Tisza, and propose an integrated framework.

The flash flood in Braunsbach, Germany, in May 2016 was a severe and rather unfamiliar event which caused high monetary losses and heavy damage to buildings. Between 7 and 8 June we investigated all affected houses and conducted damage assessment to gain insights into the damage driving factors of those events. We conclude that the damage driving factors are complex and also differ partly from those of riverine floods, pointing out the need for further research.

Landslide displacement prediction is one of the focuses of landslide research. In this paper, time series analysis was used to decompose the cumulative displacement of landslide into a trend component and a periodic component. Then LSSVM model and GA were used to predict landslide displacement. The results show that the GA-LSSVM model can be effectively used to predict landslide displacement and reflect the corresponding relationships between the major influencing factors and the displacement.

We linked modeled changes in the frequency of historical 100-year flood events to a national inventory of built assets within mapped floodplains of the United States. This allowed us to project changes in inland flooding damages nationwide under two alternative greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions scenarios. Our results suggest that more aggressive GHG reductions could reduce the projected monetary damages from inland flooding, potentially saving billions of dollars annually by the end of the century.

The paper focuses on the main features characterizing predictive models working in early warning systems (EWS), by discussing their aims, the evolution stage of the phenomenon where they should be incardinated, and their architecture, regardless of the specific application field. With reference to flow-like landslide and earth flows, some alternative approaches to the development of the predictive tool and to its implementation in an EWS are described.

This study develops tsunami evacuation plan in Padang, Indonesia, known as one of the most affected areas due to the future tsunami events generated from the Sunda subduction zone. The evacuation plan is constructed using probabilistic earthquake source modelling considering all the uncertainty of the future events. The results show that probabilistic approach may produce comprehensive tsunami hazard assessments which can be used for building more reliable and robust evacuation plans.

The Emilia-Romagna coastal plain is a low-land, highly urbanised area that will be significantly impacted by climate change. To plan adequate mitigation measures, reliable sea-level scenarios are needed. Here we suggests a method for evaluating the combined effects of sea-level rise and land subsidence in the year 2100, in terms of the increase in floodable areas during sea storms. The results allow for a regional assessment and indicate a significant local variability in the factors involved.

Episodes of intense orographic precipitation in the interior of the Iberian Peninsula have been little studied so far. The relationship with areas of mountain and the analysis of weather indexes make this study interesting. The selected area was Gredos, a broad and high range, and its effects on the spatial distribution of precipitation on the Iberian Peninsula plateau results in a sharp increase in precipitation in the south, followed by a decrease to the north of this range.

Rain-triggered lahars are significant secondary hazards at volcanoes where pyroclastic material is exposed to rainfall. Lahar risk mitigation typically relies upon ground-based flow detection or observation; however this study uses rainfall data and instrumental lahar records from the Belham valley, Montserrat, to devise new rain-triggered lahar prediction tools. These tools demonstrate the potential to effectively forecast lahars in real time, even in areas featuring strongly seasonal climates.

Social vulnerability to natural hazards in Nepal is presented in this article. The findings highlight that most of the districts in Nepal are at a high to very high social vulnerability level. The western parts of the country are found to be more vulnerable than the central and eastern parts.

The emBRACE framework of community resilience conceptualizes resilience across three core domains: resources and capacities, actions, and learning. These are influenced by extra community forces, i.e. risk governance, societal context, disturbances and system change over time. It was developed by building on existing scholarly debates, on empirical case study work in five countries and on participatory consultation with community stakeholders where the framework was applied and ground-tested.

In 2010 a sinkhole opened up in the urban area of Schmalkalden, Germany. Shear-wave reflection seismic profiles were carried out around the sinkhole to investigate the reasons for the collapse. A strike-slip fault and a fracture network were identified that serve as fluid pathways for water-leaching soluble rocks near the surface. The more complex the fault geometry and interaction between faults, the more prone an area is to sinkhole occurrence.

During the hydrological year 2015–2016 (September to August) a severe drought affected the Balearic Islands, with substantial consequences on water availability. In this paper we analyze this anomalous episode in terms of the corresponding water balance. It is shown that the drought was the result of a lack of winter precipitation, the lowest in the last 43 years. In several analyzed meteorological stations, evaporation was greater than precipitation during all the months of the year.

This contribution provides an updated planar seismic source characterization (SSC) model to be used in the probabilistic seismic hazard assessment (PSHA) for Istanbul. The state-of-the-art SSC model presented here is the first fully documented and ready-to-use fault-based SSC model developed for the PSHA of Istanbul.