Abstracted/indexed

Meteotsunamis are long waves created by atmospheric disturbances travelling over the sea. These waves can be hazardous in rare cases. Their occurrence in the Baltic Sea has been poorly known, which is why we examine century-long sea level records from the Gulf of Finland to identify these waves. In total, 121 potential meteotsunamis were found. The strong connection between meteotsunami occurrence and lightning observations indicates that meteotsunamis in this region occur during thunderstorms.

To date, the effects of tsunamis have been mainly reported from tropical and temperate climatic zones. Rare records of polar tsunamis may partly reflect the very low population densities, the short written history, and little coastal geological work focused on the sedimentary record of palaeotsunamis. We report the results of the field survey of post-tsunami damage in the Nuugaatsiaq settlement in Greenland, which on 17 June 2017 was hit by three tsunami waves triggered by a landslide.

The flood damage database HOWAS 21 contains object-specific flood damage data resulting from fluvial, pluvial and groundwater flooding. The datasets incorporate various variables of flood hazard, exposure, vulnerability and direct tangible damage at properties from several economic sectors. This paper presents HOWAS 21 and highlights exemplary analyses to demonstrate the use of HOWAS 21 flood damage data.

We considered the Western Mediterranean Oscillation index (WeMOi) to analyse the occurrence of extreme torrential episodes (≥ 200 mm in 24 h) over Catalonia (NE Iberia) during the 1951–2016 period. Principal results reveal the occurrence of 50 episodes, mainly in autumn, especially during the second 10 d period of October (11–20), coinciding with the most negative WeMOi values of the year. Seasonal changes in these episodes and in WeMOi values might be due to sea warming.

This study establishes an indicator system for social vulnerability evaluation of storm surges for coastal cities. The indicator system is applied to Shenzhen, China, and socioeconomic impacts are discovered in the results. Exposure, sensitivity, and resilience all show an increasing trend from 1986 to 2016, as resilience accounts for the largest increase and is connected to a decreasing social vulnerability trend.

This review article outlines the state of thunderstorm climatologies, which are underrepresented in the literature. Thunderstorms overlap with lightning and intense precipitation events, both of which create important hazards. This article compiles and evaluates information on datasets, research approaches and methodologies used in quantifying thunderstorm distribution, providing an introduction to the topic and signposting new and established researchers to research articles and datasets.

Although disaster experience does indeed play an important role in helping people become aware of earthquake risk, disaster experience does not necessarily increase people’s willingness to retrofit their houses. People with higher education and certain occupations represent those who might have more available resources, and therefore they might become more willing to prepare for and respond to disasters.

The geometry of estuaries is often altered through dredging to make room for ships and with extensive landfill over wetlands to enable development. Here, we use historical maps to help create computational models of seawater flow around and into a lagoonal bay of New York City for the 1880s and 2010s. Our results show that these past man-made changes cause higher coastal storm tides and that they result specifically from deeper depths, expanded inlet width, and landfill.

We investigate sources of uncertainty in coastal flood risk assessment in São Tomé and Príncipe, a small island developing state. We find that, for the present-day scenario, uncertainty from depth damage functions and digital elevation models can be more significant than that related to the estimation of significant wave height or storm surge level. For future scenarios (year 2100), sea level rise prediction becomes the input with the strongest impact on coastal flood damage estimate.

In this article, we present an automatic processing chain aimed to support the detection of landslides that induce sharp land cover changes. The chain exploits free software and spaceborne SAR data, allowing the systematic monitoring of wide mountainous regions exposed to mass movements. In the test site, we verified a general accordance between the spatial distribution of seismically induced landslides and the detected land cover changes, demonstrating its potential use in emergency management.

Forecasting of daily fire weather indices driven by the ECMWF ensemble prediction system is shown to have a good skill up to 10 d ahead in predicting flammable conditions in most regions of the world. The availability of these forecasts through the Copernicus Emergency Management Service can extend early warnings by up to 1–2 weeks, allowing for greater proactive coordination of resource-sharing and mobilization within and across countries.

The present study estimated the Kerman–Baghin aquifer vulnerability using DRASTIC and ‎composite DRASTIC (CDRASTIC) indices with the aid of geographic information system (GIS) techniques. The aquifer vulnerability maps indicated very similar results, ‎identifying the north-west parts of the aquifer as areas with high to very high vulnerability. According to the results, parts of the studied aquifer have a high vulnerability and ‎require protective measures.

In 2018 windsurfer’s mast broke about 1 km offshore during a scirocco storm in the northern Adriatic. He was drifting in severe conditions until he eventually beached alive and well in Sistiana (Italy) 24 h later. We conducted an interview with the survivor to reconstruct his trajectory. We simulate his trajectory in several ways and estimate the optimal search-and-rescue area for a civil rescue response. Properly calibrated virtual drifter properties are key to reliable rescue area forecasting.

This work presents a study of the biggest mudflow event in 20 years in Chilean Patagonia, which resulted from an avalanche in the Cordon Yelcho. We integrate in situ geotechnical tests and numerical modeling to model the Villa Santa Lucía mudflow event. Our results suggest that the initial soil water content is sufficient to transform the landslide and scoured soil into a mudflow. Therefore, knowing the soil characteristics is crucial to evaluating the impact of landslides in the study area.

In the Canary Islands, a link between rainfall and rockfall occurrence is found for most of the year, except for the warm season. Empirical rainfall thresholds for rockfalls are first proposed for Gran Canaria and Tenerife, and the dependence of the thresholds on the mean annual rainfall is discussed. The use of thresholds in early-warning systems might contribute to the mitigation of the rockfall hazard in the archipelago and reduce the associated risk.

Outlined here is a multi-disciplinary framework for analysing and evaluating the nature of vulnerability to, and capacity for, flood hazard within a complex urban society. It provides scope beyond the current, reified, descriptors of flood risk and models the role of affected individuals within flooded areas. Using agent-based modelling coupled with the LISFLOOD-FP hydrodynamic model, potentially influential behaviours that give rise to the flood hazard system are identified and discussed.

This study highlights the use of the software Flow-3D in reproducing landslide-generated impulse waves. Due to the available data and the possibility of comparing the results with other previous works, a numerical modelling investigation on the 1958 Lituya Bay tsunami event is proposed. It is noted that the rockslide impact into the waterbody has a key role in the wave initiation and thus its propagation. The concept used in this work can be applied to prevent such phenomena in future.

In this study, we corrected Asian Precipitation Highly Resolved Observational Data Integration Towards Evaluation of Water Resources (APHRODITE) in the Yarlung Tsangpo–Brahmaputra River Basin using both linear and nonlinear methods, and their influences on resulting extreme precipitation indices were assessed. Results showed that all methods were able to correct mean precipitation, but their ability to correct wet-day frequency and coefficient of variation were markedly different.

A catastrophic flash-flood event hit the northeastern part of Mallorca in 2018, causing 13 casualties and impacting on the international opinion in one of the most important tourist resorts. The analysis of the rainfall–runoff processes illustrated an unprecedented flashy behaviour in Europe triggering the natural disaster. UAVs and hydrogeomorphological precision techniques were used as a rapid post-catastrophe decision-making tool, playing a key role during the rescue searching tasks.

There is increasing interest and need to analyze the contribution of anthropogenic climate change to negative impacts of climate change. We study the case of glacial lake Palcacocha in Peru, which poses a significant flood risk to the city of Huaraz. We found that greenhouse gas emissions; strong urbanization processes without appropriate land use planning; and social, cultural, political, and institutional factors all contribute to the existing flood risk.

A localized empirical model consisting of multilevel parameters has been built to evaluate the flood vulnerability of residential buildings in a heritage community of Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. A new economic loss model is developed to quantify the flood risk in terms of replacement cost, taking into account both specific vulnerability and a normalized depth–damage ratio function. The findings provide multiscale flood-resistant strategies for the protection of individual residential buildings.

Rock avalanches are extremely dangerous, causing much damage worldwide. The Masiere di Vedana is a rock avalanche deposit (9 km², 170 Mm³) in NE Italy. We dated it back to late Roman to early Middle Ages. Identified drivers are the overall structural setting, exceptional rainfall events and seismic shakings. No exceptional event is required as a trigger. When dealing with heavily deformed bedrocks, especially in inhabited areas, the occurrence of a huge event like this must be considered.

Hydrological impacts of climate change are generally performed by following steps from global to regional climate modeling through data tailoring and hydrological modeling. Usually, the climate–hydrology chain primary focuses on medium to large catchments. To study impacts of climate change on small catchments, a high-resolution regional climate model and hydrological model are required. The results from high-resolution models help in proposing specific adaptation strategies for impacts.

Awu is a little-known volcano in Indonesia, and paradoxically it is one of the deadliest volcanoes on Earth. Some of its recurrent intense eruptions have induced world-scale impacts. The pulverization of a cooled lava dome and its conduit plug have allowed lake water injection into the conduit, leading to explosive water–magma interaction. The past vigorous eruptions were likely induced by these phenomena and it is a possible scenario for future events.

Estimating risks induced by interacting natural hazards remains a challenge for practitioners. An approach to tackle this challenge is to use multivariate statistical models. Here we evaluate the efficacy of six models. The models are compared against synthetic data which are comparable to time series of environmental variables. We find which models are more appropriate to estimate relations between hazards in a range of cases. We highlight the benefits of this approach with two examples.

Mitigation planning and economic loss assessment generally rely on flood damage prediction models. However, unavailability of empirical data has limited the use of such models in data-scarce areas. This paper combines the vulnerability indicator and damage grade approach to develop a conceptual framework for predicting building damage in data-scarce regions. The framework can be implemented using only expert knowledge and facilitates transferability of flood damage models in data-scarce areas.