The results showed in this paper confirmed that the occurrence of landslides in the study area cannot be attributed solely and exclusively to the rainfall events of the year 2000. Therefore, numerical modelling results corroborated the fact that the occurrence of landslides was the combination of natural and anthropic factors, with the decisive influence of the latter due to the presence of several cuts along the slope combined with load of constructions and leakage.

The vast majority of shallow landslides and debris flows are precipitation initiated and predicted using historical landslides plotted versus observed precipitation information. However, this approach has severe limitations. This is partly due to the fact that it is not precipitation that initiates a landslide or debris flow but rather the hydrological dynamics in the soil and slope. We propose to include hydrological information in the regional hydro-meteorological hazard assessment.

On 14 April 2016, an M_w 6.5 earthquake occurred in Kumamoto prefecture, Japan (foreshock). About 28 h later, another earthquake of M_w 7.0 occurred (mainshock). The earthquake produced extensive losses to the infrastructure. This paper shows the extraction of collapsed buildings from a pair of airborne lidar data recorded before and after the mainshock. A number of methods were applied and their performances were evaluated by comparison with actual data obtained from a field survey.

The solution mining of salt mineral resources may contaminate groundwater and lead to water inrush out of the ground due to brine leakage. The geological condition determines the total risk; physical–chemical reaction principle analysis and hydrogeochemical simulation can determine the source of the brine leakage and identify the mixed proportion of inrush water in a multilayered rock salt mining area. The research is advantageous for groundwater protection and public health.

Extreme-temperature anomalies such as heat and cold waves may have strong impacts on human activities and health. Providing a robust operational system to monitor extreme-temperature anomalies in Europe, developed and validated in this study, is thus of prime importance. This work exposes the methodology and the climatology of these events. It also discusses the associated uncertainties according to the datasets and the methods used.

While country-specific, continental and global susceptibility maps are increasingly available, local and regional susceptibility studies remain rare in remote and data-poor settings. Here, we provide a landslide susceptibility assessment for the inhabited region of the Rwenzori Mountains. We find that higher spatial resolutions do not necessarily lead to better models and that models built for local case studies perform better than aggregated susceptibility assessments on the regional scale.

Orbital remote sensing showed that the Cerrado was the second/first biome for the occurrence of hotspots and burned area (BA), which were higher in the dry season and in the savanna land use and are tending to decrease. Spatial analysis showed that values for the entire biome can hide patterns and that there is a 2- to 3-month lag between precipitation and hotspots/BA, while minimum VCI and maximum hotspots/BA occur in the same month. VCI indicates the susceptibility of vegetation to ignition.

We developed fragility functions of aquaculture rafts and eelgrass based on damage data and numerical simulation of the 2011 Great East Japan tsunami. These fragility functions explain damage characteristics of both items against tsunami flow velocity. By understanding these characteristics, damage estimation and loss assessment as well as marine/fishery disaster mitigation plan and management in other areas of the world from future tsunamis can be implemented.

The infrequent coinciding of several hydrometeorological conditions common to the Western Boreal Plain, including low autumn soil moisture, modest snowpack, lack of spring precipitation, and high spring air temperatures and winds, ultimately led to the widespread Horse river fire in May of 2016. Monitoring antecedent soil moisture would aid management strategies in producing of more accurate overwintered Drought Code calculations, providing early warning signals ahead of spring wildfire seasons.

Recently, flash floods at some regions have occurred with very short duration less than 1 h. It is necessary to develop the criteria for deciding intuitively the flash flood occurrence with short duration. This article proposes quantitative criteria for flash flood warning that can be used to rapidly assess flash flood occurrence based on only rainfall estimates. The key advantage of this method is possible to issue flash flood warnings without running the entire hydrometeorological model.

There is currently no protocol for rapid humanitarian-facing landslide assessment and no published recognition of what is possible and useful to compile immediately after a triggering event. Drawing on the 2015 Gorkha earthquake (Nepal), we consider how quickly a landslide assessment based upon manual satellite-based emergency mapping (SEM) can be realistically achieved and review the decisions taken by analysts to ascertain the timeliness and type of useful information that can be generated.

In a context of rising sea levels linked to global warming, the issue of marine flood risk is becoming central to the management of low-lying coasts in the decades to come. The CRISSIS research program aims to propose a multidisciplinary, integrated and operational approach of marine flood risk, involving geographers, modellers, geomaticians and specialists in risk and crisis management. This work is dedicated to understand and simulate the hazard through historical and statistic approaches.

This study focuses on the determination of seismic behavior and safety of specific bridges under seismic conditions. One of the nine intensity measures is selected considering practicality, efficiency, and proficiency. Component and system fragility curves are derived considering serviceability limits and component capacity. The results show that serves velocity limits has important effects on fragility curves of bridges and truss piers elements are the most vulnerable elements in the system.

The criteria for zoning the surface fault rupture hazard (SFRH) along-thrust faults are defined by analysing the characteristics of the areas of coseismic surface faulting in thrust earthquakes. The results and the database made available as supplementary material can be used for improving the attenuation relationships for distributed faulting, with possible applications in probabilistic studies of fault displacement hazard.

Refugee populations are often unaccounted for in population models used in earthquake fatality estimations. This paper calculates and compares fatality estimations produced with and without refugee populations in southeastern Turkey. Refugee populations added non-negligible contributions to earthquake fatalities at four of five fault locations, increasing total fatalities by 7–27 %. These findings show the importance of including refugee statistics in earthquake fatality estimations.

Preparedness activities and flood forecasting have received increasing attention and have led towards new science-based early warning systems. Understanding the flood triggering mechanisms will result in increasing warning lead times, providing sufficient time for early action. Findings of this study indicate that the consideration of short- and long-term antecedent conditions can be used by humanitarian organizations and decision makers for improved flood risk management.

Remotely Piloted Aircraft System was used for the engineering geological investigation of a marble mine area in Italy. High resolution images were processed by using SfM techniques for obtaining an accurate and detailed three-dimensional model of the area. Geological and geometrical information was used for a preliminary stability analysis with focus on investigating the contribution of potential rock bridges of two large blocks that pose a potential hazard issue for the workforce.

This work shows that a multiphase flow solver using a multi-material level-set method with yield-stress models of non-Newtonian viscosity provides a means for numerical approximation of avalanches and subaqueous debris flows. This simulation approach was tested with both time-independent and time-dependent models of viscosity. Moreover, two different approaches were used to evaluate the Coussot parameters. Overall, the numerical results showed reasonable agreement with prior experimental data.

The paper presents field evidence and a kinematic study of rock block motion mobilized by a M_w = 6.5 earthquake near the island of Lefkada on 17 November 2015. A detailed survey was conducted using an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV). Using the impact points from the actual rockfall trajectory, an analytical approach to reconstruct the trajectory was implemented using 2-D, 3-D and kinematic analyses. The actual trajectory could not be accurately predicted, revealing limitations of existing models.

The 5 Dec 1997 magnitude 7.8 Kronotsky earthquake and tsunami occurred on a dark night in an unpopulated area. A limited (Dec 97) post-tsunami survey found relatively small run-up, which influenced some earthquake analyses. Years later, to our surprise, we discovered an extensive tsunami deposit up to 9 m above sea level on an unexplored coastal sector. Our tsunami runup data require reevaluation of earthquake rupture location and characteristics, and of the northern Kamchatka subduction zone.

Findings from this study show that a huge number of new areas in coastal Bangladesh are going to face the impact of storm surge inundation as well as an increase in surge level due to the effect of sea level rise. These results are important for the local government to consider while they make new management and policy decisions so they can improve tropical preparedness plans by increasing the numbers of shelters and shelter heights.

On 19 May 2016 a temperature of 51.0 °C in Phalodi (northwest India) set a new Indian record. In 2015 a very lethal heat wave had occurred in the southeast. We find that in India the trend in extreme temperatures due to greenhouse gases is largely cancelled by increasing air pollution and irrigation. The health impacts of heat waves do increase due to higher humidity and air pollution. This implies that we expect heat waves to become much hotter as soon as air pollution is brought under control.

In this study we use hidden Markov models, a machine learning algorithm to automatically identify avalanche events in a continuous seismic data set recorded during the winter 2010. With additional post processing steps, we detected around 70 avalanche events. Although not every detection could be confirmed as an avalanche, we clearly identified the two main avalanche periods of the winter season 2010 in our classification results.

The long-term effect of strong earthquakes on geological hazards in mountainous areas is an underestimated issue, but the integrated use of field monitoring, remote sensing, and real-time predictive modelling can help to set up effective early warning systems, provide timely alarms, optimize rescue operations, and perform more accurate secondary hazard assessments. With this paper we wish to stimulate an open discussion on post-seismic slope stability and its implications for policy makers.

This paper describes the criteria for the optimal selection of remote sensing images to map event landslides, discussing the ability of monoscopic and stereoscopic VHR satellite images and ultra-high-resolution UAV images to resolve the landslide photographical and morphological signatures. The findings can be useful to decide on the optimal imagery and technique to be used when planning the production of a landslide inventory map.