Natural hazards impact thousands of people every year. Floods, droughts, extreme storms, landslides, wildfires, and permafrost erosion all change the Earth's surface and can inflict tremendous damage on human infrastructure. Numerical models of Earth surface processes are one tool to simulate natural hazard processes and provide quantitative pre-event risk assessment. Yet such assessments are only appropriate when the models capture all important physical processes, when the models are tested and well-vetted, when they are usable and proven accurate.

The aim of the special issue is to identify (a) the current state of the art of our current natural hazard process understanding, both fundamentally in the Earth surface processes and in the modelling approaches and technology; (b) important gaps and shortcomings; (c) improvements in natural hazard modelling for risk assessment, with a special focus on building a next-generation cyberinfrastructure and a community of modern modelling and data analysis practices; (d) modeling and conveying uncertainty in numerical risk assessments; and (e) case studies in which numerical models have increased resilience by reducing vulnerability to disasters. This proposal for a NHESS special issue arises from a 3-day international natural hazards conference, Geoprocesses, Geohazards – CSDMS 2018, held during May 22–24th at the University of Colorado, Boulder, USA. See also: https://csdms.colorado.edu/wiki/CSDMS_meeting_2018.

The call for the special issue is open for all submissions within the given scope.