Railways in floodplains and coastal areas are frequently damaged by floods. Railway systems suffering scour damage face interruption of operation for weeks. This substantially limits the socioeconomic activities that rely on the transport service provided by the railway. This paper proposes new fragility curves for railway embankment and ballast scour. This contributes to expand our ability to estimate risk of flood hazard on our society more holistic than ever.

Coal mines in the western areas of China experience low mining rates and induce many geohazards when using the room and pillar mining method. In this research, we proposed a roadway backfill method during longwall mining to target these problems. The surface monitoring data shows that the ground basically had no obvious deformation after the implementation of the roadway backfill method.

An historical database of about 500 flash floods occurred in the Campania region (southern Italy) from 1540 to 2015 is presented. Most of the collected events have a medium-to-high temporal accuracy, meaning that day, month and year of occurrence are known. The repetitiveness of the events highlighted that among the 86 municipalities hit, 16 recorded more than 10 events. About 18% of the events in the database caused at least one victim. This study is the first step to perform a hazard analysis.

Forecasting a landslide collapse is a key element in risk reduction, but it is also a very difficult task due to scientific difficulties in predicting a complex natural event and the severe social repercussions caused by a false or missed alarm. In order to help decision makers, we propose a method of increasing the confidence when making landslide predictions. This study also helps understand how geology affects landslide predictability by introducing a predictability index.

This paper develops a seismic hazard methodology for crustal faults without direct evidence of present activity. The knowledge of this fault type is important when faults are located closer than 10 km from a highly populated area. The San Ramón Fault, close to Santiago, the capital of Chile, was chosen to test this methodology. The main result is the identification of some areas (close to the fault) where damage would be severe if the expected earthquake occurs.

Adequate flood damage assessments can help to minimize damage costs in the SIDS. Data availability is, however, a major issue in these areas. In order to determine the minimal data necessary for an adequate result, a sensitivity analysis was performed on the input data. This has shown that population density, in combination with an average number of people per household, is a good parameter to determine building damage. Furthermore, a complete road dataset is visually indispensable.

This work evaluates shoreline response to storm impacts at four beaches in SW Spain by comparing medium- and short-term rates of shoreline change and storm parameters. Results show that shoreline behaviour is mainly determined by both anthropogenic and geological factors. Moreover, a correlation is found between storm parameters and shoreline changes in exposed areas with a low degree of human intervention. This work provides a useful contribution to the prediction of coastal variations.

In this paper, a three-dimensional hydrodynamic model was coupled to a biological model to simulate the ecological system of the East China Sea. In addition, the sensitive experiments were also used to examine the role of physical forcing (river discharge, wind speed, wind direction) in controlling hypoxia in waters adjacent the Yangtze Estuary. The results showed that the wind field and river discharge have significant impact on the hypoxia off the Yangtze Estuary.

INSYDE is a new synthetic flood damage model based on a component-by-component analysis of physical damage to buildings. The damage functions are designed using an expert-based approach with the support of existing scientific and technical literature, loss adjustment studies, and damage surveys. The model structure is designed to be transparent and flexible, and therefore it can be applied in different geographical contexts.

We present a database of pre-calculated tsunami waveforms for the entire Mediterranean Sea, obtained by numerical propagation of uniformly spaced Gaussian-shaped elementary sources for the sea level elevation. Based on any initial sea surface displacement, the database allows the fast calculation of full waveforms of coastal sites. The resulting product is suitable for different applications such as probabilistic tsunami hazard, tsunami source inversions and tsunami warning systems.

Water level sensors often experience unexpected gaps and outliers that cause major difficulties in detecting tsunamis. Thus, we propose a tsunami arrival time detection system applicable to discontinuous time-series data with outliers. We want to stress that the efficiency and simplicity of the system enable its wide application in tsunami monitoring areas.

A multiscale sampling experiment was carried out in the Gulf of Taranto (eastern Mediterranean) providing the first synoptic evidence of the large-scale circulation structure and associated mesoscale variability. The circulation is shown to be dominated by an anticyclonic gyre and upwelling areas at the gyre periphery.

Post-seismic landslides highlighted the need for more research to provide critical information for reconstruction. By mapping detailed landslide inventories, our work shows that most of the landslide activities were concentrated within the first 3 years after the earthquake, and they are majorly determined by vegetation regrowth, available volumes of loose materials, and extreme rainfall events. The landslide activity will continue to decay, but it may be halted if extreme rainfall occurs.

In this paper an overview of the IOPs that affected the Adriatic area during SOP1 HyMeX campaign is presented. Results in this paper highlight the need for an intensive observation period in the future over the Adriatic region. The aim is to better understand the relevant processes and validate the simulated mechanisms as well as to improve numerical forecasts via data assimilation and improvements of model representation of moist processes and sea–land–atmosphere interactions.

In 2012, a village in southern Philippines was wiped out by catastrophic debris flows generated Super Typhoon Bopha. This area of the country is seldom hit by strong typhoons; nevertheless, geologic evidence shows that such events have happened in the past. We put this in the context of the expansion of human settlements to understand why the disaster happened. Doing so will enable communities that are not used to such events to prepare for them.

We established a preliminary theoretical methodology and an operational approach for assessing drought risk of maize based on a physical vulnerability curve using the EPIC model to further understand the hazard mechanisms of drought. Based on the assumption that all maize was exposed to drought hazard, the risk assessment of agricultural drought of the farming–pastoral ecotone in Northern China was conducted from the drought hazard index and physical vulnerability curve.

A new web-based and mobile Decision Support System (DSS) for Search-And-Rescue (SAR) at sea is presented, and its performance is evaluated using real case scenarios. The system, named OCEAN-SAR, is accessible via the website http://www.ocean-sar.com. OCEAN-SAR simulates drifting objects at sea, using as input ocean currents and wind. The performance of the service is evaluated by comparing simulations to data from the Italian Coast Guard pertaining to actual incidents in the Mediterranean Sea.

This study investigates the propagation of landslide inventory-based positional errors into statistical landslide susceptibility models by artificially introducing such spatial inaccuracies. The findings highlight that (i) an increasing positional error is related to increasing distortions of modelling and validation results, (ii) interrelations between inventory-based errors and modelling results are complex, and (iii) inventory-based errors can be counteracted by adapting the study design.

A database of fatalities caused by natural hazards in Switzerland was compiled for the period from 1946 to 2015: in 70 years, 635 events occurred causing 1023 fatalities. The most common causes of death were snow avalanches (37 %), followed by lightning (16 %), floods (12 %), windstorms (10 %), rockfalls (8 %) and landslides (7 %). The annual number of victims showed a distinct decrease over time. In comparison to other countries, the natural hazard mortality rate in Switzerland is quite low.

Assessing the numbers and locations of exposed people is crucial in landslide risk management and emergency planning. This study applies dasymetric cartography to assessing the potentially exposed population per building and comparing it with results from the basic census units. A dasymetric approach increases the spatial resolution of the population and enables the use of detailed landslide susceptibility maps, which is highly valuable for assessing the exposed population.

This paper presents a model to develop multipurpose complete event scenarios, which address all the needs that arise after a disaster. In detail, such scenarios (i) are multisectoral, (ii) address the spatial scales relevant for the event at stake, (iii) consider the temporal evolution of damage and (iv) allow damage mechanisms to be understood. The model allows flood mitigation strategies to be optimized, as proved by its use in a case study.

Sediments and landforms related to Typhoon Haiyan were documented for coastal settings on the Philippines. Sand sheets are restricted to coasts with strong inundation, while washover fans due to overtopping waves were more abundant. Wave-generated coral ridges are reported from an intertidal reef platform. As generated by an exceptional storm, documented signatures like the limited landward extent of sand sheets may potentially help to distinguish storm and tsunami in the geological record.

We introduce a novel method for the spatial–temporal cluster analysis of severe tornado touchdowns that are part of tornado outbreaks. Tornado outbreaks, groups of tornadoes occurring close to each other in time and space, constitute a severe hazard that has few quantitative measures. Our new approach, which we illustrate using three USA severe tornado outbreaks and models, differentiates between types of tornado outbreaks and, within outbreaks, identifies clusters in both time and space.