The study presents a newly developed statistical method to assess the risk of thunderstorms in complex terrain. Observations of lightning serve as an indicator for thunderstorms. The application of the method is illustrated for Carinthia which is located in Austria, Europe.

Coastal settlements face unprecedented pressures from sea level variations. To investigate such issues, we applied a land change model to simulate three scenarios of urban growth under different land use policies and validated the model in Bay County, Florida (USA). The work shows that strict flood mitigation strategies mitigate greatly the urban exposure to sea-level-rise-induced flooding. Planners and hazard mitigation teams can use the procedures to strengthen coastal planning and management.

This paper is an attempt to develop a rapid tsunami evacuation decision support system for local decision makers. Based on the numerical results database of tsunami disasters, this system can quickly obtain the tsunami inundation and travel time. When an earthquake and tsunami occur, this system can rapidly provide information to assist with the tsunami evacuation operations.

Annual air temperature spiked and glacier retreated shortly before the three periglacial debris flows in Tianmo valley. However, they did not occur when glacier retreat was sharpest, resulting from the frozen bared glacial till as the melting of internal ice lags behind glacial retreat. The activity of the glacial till can be enhanced by prolonged high air temperature. Finally, either rainfall or continuous percolation of ice ablation water flows can generate debris flow.

Return values can be estimated from large data sets stemming from numerical models. The question explored here is how much of the original data must be kept in order to compute unbiased return estimates. We find that retaining only a small fraction is usually enough. This offers huge storage and computational savings. We provide a set of examples to demonstrate how this can be done.

This paper was the first to assess and analyze the ripple effects of indirect economic loss and spatial heterogeneity of both direct and indirect economic loss caused by a hypothetical earthquake, with the same magnitude as the 2008 Wenchuan earthquake, in the disaster-hit area of Beijing at the scale of the smallest administrative divisions in China (streets, villages, and towns). The results will help the government better allocate rescue funds to the regions that may suffer serious damage.

Exceptional floods in the context of heavy rains in central and eastern Europe, reaching flood danger quota on almost all of the tributaries in the middle sector of the Prut River. We found exceptional flooding along the main course of the Prut River and the occurrence of a unique backwater phenomenon called spider flow.

In the Metropolitan District of Quito is located on or very close to five segments of reverse blind faults. The city is divided into five areas: south, south-central, central, north-central and north. For each of the urban areas, elastic response spectra are calculated considering the maximum magnitude. Subsequently, the recurrence period of earthquakes of maximum magnitude are presented.

Risks from flooding are of global importance. Experience gained in Nepal is presented to demonstrate that empowering the communities impacted by flooding to be active participants in risk mitigation can have significant positive impacts. In part this is achieved through community involvement in the provision of warnings based on observations of river flow upstream. The success of simple, robust methodology for the early provision of such warnings based on predicting future river flows is shown.

This research was conducted in order to determine what effect a longer hurricane season is likely to have on flooding risk in the southeastern United States. We found that an extension of the hurricane season to May–December (just 2 months longer) increased the number of days that would be at risk to flooding were the average tropical cyclone to occur by 28–180 %. This is signifiant, as global climate change is likely to increase sea surface temperatures and extend the hurricane season.

This work constitutes the first comprehensive attempt to record the spatial characteristics of the Aegean island beaches (Greece) and assess the long-term and episodic sea level rise (SLR) impacts under different scenarios. Results suggest that Aegean beaches may be particularly vulnerable to SLRs, where severe impacts which could be devastating are projected by 2100. Appropriate coastal "setback zone" policies should be adopted, as they form a significant environmental and economic resource.

We studied a period of torrential rain between 1 and 6 September 2014 in the Gargano Promontory, Puglia, southern Italy, which caused a variety of geohydrological hazards, including landslides, flash floods, inundations and sinkholes. We used the rainfall and the landslide information available to us to design and test the new ensemble – non-exceedance probability (E-NEP) algorithm for the quantitative evaluation of the probability of the occurrence of rainfall-induced landslides.

This paper proposes a model for assessing the risk posed by natural hazards to infrastructures, with a focus on the indirect losses and loss of stability of the population relying on the infrastructure. The proposed model enables the comparison between scenarios in municipal risk and vulnerability analyses, considering the natural hazards and different aspects of vulnerability, including the physical vulnerability of the infrastructure itself and the societal dependency on the infrastructure.

Results of 36-years of hindcast in the Mediterranean Sea are analysed to detect time clustering of wave storms using the Allan factor. The analysis reveals that some areas of the basin are characterized by storm clustering for timescales t < 50 days, while seasonality is dominant at large scales. The findings highlight a deviation from the Poisson distribution in some sub-basins of the Mediterranean Sea. Implications for coastal erosion/flooding need to be studied further.