flood
Type of resources
Keywords
Publication year
Topics
-
<div>The A1 poster incorporates 4 images of Australia taken from space by Earth observing satellites. The accompanying text briefly introduces sensors and the bands within the electromagnetic spectrum. The images include examples of both true and false colour and the diverse range of applications of satellite images such as tracking visible changes to the Earth’s surface like crop growth, bushfires, coastal changes and floods. Scientists, land and emergency managers use satellite images to analyse vegetation, surface water or human activities as well as evaluate natural hazards.</div>
-
Poster showing the 2010 Floods in Queensland fill Lake Eyre
-
The Swan River is the main river through Perth, the capital city of Western Australia. Direct tangible economic losses to residential dwellings in Perth was based on hydraulic modelling using the one dimensional unsteady flow model HEC-RAS, geographical information systems, a building exposure database and synthetic stage-damage curves. Eight flood scenarios ranging from the 10 year average recurrence interval (ARI) to the 2000 year ARI event were examined. The combined structure and contents flood losses ranged from A$17 million to A$659 million for insured structures and A$14 million to A$583 million for uninsured structures. This equates to an average annual damage of A$9.6 million and A$7.9 million respectively. The results reinforce the need to consider a wide range of varying magnitude flood events when assessing losses due to the temporal and spatial variation between flood scenarios.
-
Every year floods cause millions of dollars damage to buildings and infrastructure, as well as to agricultural land and crops. They also disrupt business, and affect the safety and health of communities. The losses due to flooding vary widely from year to year and are dependent on a number of factors such as the severity of a flood and its location. Between 1967 and 2005 the average annual direct cost of floods in Australia has been estimated at AUD$377 million (BITRE 2008). This figure is likely to have risen following the widespread and devastating floods across eastern Australia that occurred over the summer of 2010-11.
-
The response to emergency situations such as floods and fires demand products in short time frames. If you use remote sensing then the response typically involves detailed examination of imagery in order to determine the spectral bands, ratios and associated thresholds that map the desired features such as flood or burn extent. The trial and error process associated with manual threshold selection is often time consuming and can result in significant errors due to confounding factors such as clouds and shadowed areas. By modelling features such as flood waters or fire scars as Gaussian distributions, allowing for fuzzy thresholds with neighbouring features, the required thresholds can be automatically derived from the imagery and emergency events can have extents determined much more rapidly. Automatic threshold selection minimises trial and error, thereby dramatically reducing processing turn-around time.
-
Recent climate conditions experienced in Australia certainly ring true with the famous words from author, Dorothea Mackellar, ‘of droughts and flooding rains’.
-
In this paper a new benchmark for tsunami model validation is pro- posed. The benchmark is based upon the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, which provides a uniquely large amount of observational data for model comparison. Unlike the small number of existing benchmarks, the pro- posed test validates all three stages of tsunami evolution - generation, propagation and inundation. Specifically we use geodetic measurements of the Sumatra{Andaman earthquake to validate the tsunami source, al- timetry data from the jason satellite to test open ocean propagation, eye-witness accounts to assess near shore propagation and a detailed inundation survey of Patong Bay, Thailand to compare model and observed inundation. Furthermore we utilise this benchmark to further validate the hydrodynamic modelling tool anuga which is used to simulate the tsunami inundation. Important buildings and other structures were incorporated into the underlying computational mesh and shown to have a large inuence of inundation extent. Sensitivity analysis also showed that the model predictions are comparatively insensitive to large changes in friction and small perturbations in wave weight at the 100 m depth contour.
-
Widespread flooding and associated damage in south-east Queensland during January and February, 2011 have demonstrated the importance of flood risk assessment. Flood risk assessment requires knowledge of the hazard, nature of properties exposed and their vulnerability to flood damage. Flood risk assessment can addresses different aspects of flood risk, i.e., hydrological, structural, economic and social aspects. This report presents the results of work undertaken by Geoscience Australia during 2011-2012 to further the understanding of the vulnerability of Australian buildings to inundation. The work consists of three parts: 1. Development of vulnerability curves for inundation, without velocity, of residential homes of the types encountered during surveys following the January, 2011 flooding in south-east Queensland. 2. Development of vulnerability curves for inundation, without velocity, of building types typical of the Alexandria Canal area of the inner south of Sydney. 3. Development of vulnerability curves for inundation with velocity (storm surge) of residential homes of the types encountered during surveys following TC Yasi, February, 2011.
-
The flood risk in many urban catchments is poorly understood. Legacy stormwater infrastructure is often substandard and anticipated climate change induced sea level rise and increased rainfall intensity will typically exacerbate present risk. In a Department of Climate Change and Energy Efficiency (DCCEE) funded collaboration between Geoscience Australia (GA) and the City of Sydney (CoS), the impacts on the Alexandra Canal catchment have been studied. This work has built upon detailed flood hazard analyses by Cardno commissioned by the CoS and has entailed the development of exposure and vulnerability information. Significantly, the case study has highlighted the value of robust exposure attributes and vulnerability models in the development of flood risk knowledge. The paper describes how vulnerability knowledge developed following the 2011 Brisbane floods to include key building types found in the inner suburb of Sydney. It also describes the systematic field capture of building exposure information in the catchment area and its categorisation into 19 generic building types. The assessment of ground floor heights using the Field Data Analysis Tool (FiDAT) developed at Geoscience Australia is also presented. The selected hazard scenario was a 100 year ARI event with 20% increased rainfall intensity accompanied by a 0.55m sea level rise in Botany Bay. The impact from the selected scenario was assessed in terms of monetary loss for four combinations of vulnerability model suite (GA and NSW Government) and floor height attribution method (assumed 0.15m uniformly and evaluated from LiDAR and street view imagery). It was observed that the total loss is higher in the case of assumed floor heights compared to FiDAT processed floor heights as the former failed to capture increased floor heights for newer construction. However, the loss is lower when only two vulnerability models developed by NSW Government are applied for the entire building stock in the region as two models could not reliably represent the whole building stock.
-
The Risk Research Group at Geoscience Australia (GA) in Canberra is a multidisciplinary team engaged in the development of risk models for a range of natural hazards that are applicable to Australian urban areas. The Group includes hazard experts, numerical modellers, engineers, economists, and a specialist researching social vulnerability. The risk posed by riverine flooding to residential buildings is an important component of the work undertaken by the Group and is the focus of this paper. In 1975 researcher Richard Black published a report titled Flood Proofing Rural Residences as part of a multidisciplinary investigation of flood risk management in the USA. Black's research produced a number of curves describing combinations of water depth and velocity theoretically required to move a flooded house from its foundations. These so-called 'Black's Curves' have been referenced by numerous researchers worldwide since their publication. The houses used in Black's study are small by modern standards, and construction materials used in Australia can differ from those used in Black's research.