During the last five years, the Australian aid program has supported a series of successful capacity-building activities for natural disaster risk assessment within neighboring Southeast Asian countries. Although the modality of engagement between the agencies has varied in each country context, the successes have been uniformly underpinned by strong, long-term bilateral government-to-government (G2G) relationships between Geoscience Australia (GA) and partner technical agencies.

In response to the catastrophic flooding in south east Queensland in early 2011 that caused between AUS$5-6 billion damage, the Australian Government initiated the National Disaster Review; an independent review into the insurance arrangements for individuals and businesses for damages and losses due to flood and other natural disasters. The review emphasised that consumers need to be aware of the risks they face, and highlighted the lack of consistency in the collection and provision of flood risk information. In response the Australian Government committed AUS$12 m over 4 years to the National Flood Risk Information Project (NFRIP). NFRIP was established to improve the quality, availability of accessibility of flood information across Australia and commenced in July 2012 with Geoscience Australia as the technical lead and Attorney Generals department taking the policy lead. The project comprises three core activities. 1) Development of the Australia Flood Risk Information Portal (AFRIP; www.ga.gov.au/afrip ), an online flood information portal that provides free access to authoritative flood study information and associated mapping from a central location. Centralising this information will make it easy for the public, engineering consultants, insurers, researchers and emergency managers to find out what flood information and mapping exists and where, and to better understand their risk. 2) Analysis of Geoscience Australia's historic archive of satellite imagery from 1987 to the present to provide an indication of how often surface water has been observed anywhere in Australia over the period of the archive. These Water Observations from Space (WOfS; www.ga.gov.au/wofs ) provide baseline information that can be used when no other flood information is available and an understanding of where surface water may impact assets and utility infrastructure. 3) Improving the quality of future flood information by completing the revision of the Australian Rainfall and Runoff guidelines (ARR; www.arr.org.au ). ARR is a series of national guidelines, methodologies and datasets fundamental for flood modelling that was updated in 1987 and modified 1997. The revised guidelines will provide flood professionals with information and data necessary to produce more accurate and consistent flood studies and mapping into the future. This presentation will provide a brief summary of the NFRIP objectives and progress to date, discuss some of the problems encountered in sourcing and making natural hazard and risk information public, and reflect on the broader challenges in the communication of risk to the wider community.

Survey conducted after the 2009 Victoria Bushfires.

Economic analysis of natural hazards (wind, flood and storm surge) Australia wide. See more info in: http://www.garnautreview.org.au/

To determine the magnitude of severe wind gust hazard due to thunderstorm downbursts using regional climate model output and analysis of observed data (including radar reflectivity and proximity soundings).

A new finite volume algorithm to solve the two dimensional shallow water equations on an unstructured triangular mesh has been implemented in the open source ANUGA software, jointly developed by the Australian National University and Geoscience Australia. The algorithm allows for 'discontinuous-elevation', or 'jumps' in the bed profile between neighbouring cells. This has a number of benefits compared with previously implemented 'continuous-elevation' approaches. Firstly it can preserve stationary states at wet-dry fronts, while also permitting simulation of very shallow frictionally dominated flow down slopes as occurs in direct-rainfall flood models. Additionally the use of discontinuous-elevation enables the sharp resolution of rapid changes in the topography associated with e.g. narrow rectangular drainage channels, or buildings, without the computational expense of a very fine mesh. The approach also supports a simple and computationally efficient treatment of river walls. A number of benchmark tests are presented illustrating these features of the algorithm, along with its application to urban flood hazard simulation and comparison with field data.

Tsunami hazard assessments are often derived using computational approaches that model the occurrence rates of a suite of hypothetical earthquake-tsunami scenarios. While uniform slip earthquake models are often used, recent studies have emphasized that spatially non-uniform earthquake slip substantially affects tsunamis, with wave heights and run-up varying by a factor of three or more due to slip heterogeneities alone (i.e. assuming fixed ‘bulk rupture parameters’ such as the earthquake magnitude, rupture plane geometry, location, and shear modulus). As a result, stochastic slip models are increasingly being used for directly simulating slip variability in hazard assessments. Irrespective of how the tsunami scenarios are generated, the statistical properties of the modelled tsunami need to well approximate the statistical properties of real tsunami with the same bulk rupture parameters. For example, ideally a future real tsunami will have a 50% chance of having a peak wave height below the median corresponding synthetic peak wave height; a 90% chance of being below the 90th percentile; and so on. Testing is required to determine whether any model has performance comparable to this ideal case. The literature suggests large differences in the statistical properties of stochastic slip models, implying not all will give a good representation of real tsunami variability. However, by comparing model scenarios against a suite of historic tsunami observations, we can statistically test whether key properties of real tsunami have the same distribution as their corresponding synthetic scenarios. We would recommend that such tests become standard in the validation of tsunami hazard scenario generation methods, to reduce the chance of using an inappropriate model which could significantly bias a hazard assessment. The current study evaluates the statistical performance of earthquake-tsunami scenarios which form part of the updated Australian Probabilistic Tsunami Hazard Assessment, currently being developed by Geoscience Australia. The model scenarios are compared with deep-ocean DART buoy wave time-series for 15 recent tsunamis, each recorded at between 1 and 28 sites. No event specific calibration is applied to the models. We evaluate three different earthquake-tsunami scenario generation methods (fixed-size uniform slip; variable-size uniform-slip; variable-size stochastic-slip) in terms of how well they model the statistical properties of wave heights, and discuss the capacity of each method to generate wave time-series which match historical events. We find that some events cannot be well modelled using our fixed-size uniform-slip scenarios, while it is usually possible to match observations reasonably well with a variable-size uniform-slip event, or a variable-size stochastic-slip event. Both of the latter produce families of solutions which usually envelope the observed DART buoy tsunami wave heights, although quantiles of the variable-size uniform-slip events appear to have some downward bias, while quantiles of the variable-size stochastic-slip events seem more consistent with observations.

Internal advice on tsunami, earthquake and severe wind hazards for the Vanimo Port region, derived from large-scale hazard assessments. This advice (refer TRIM D2021-52746) was provided to the Australia Pacific Climate Partnership (APCP) as part of Geoscience Australia's (GA's) contributions to the program. (In confidence report to APCP, not for distribution)

Internal advice on tsunami, earthquake and severe wind hazards for the Kimbe Bay region, derived from large-scale hazard assessments. This advice (refer TRIM D2021-55557) was provided to the Australia Pacific Climate Partnership (APCP) as part of Geoscience Australia's (GA's) contributions to the program. (In confidence report to APCP, not for distribution)

Bookmark developed during the year of the 30th anniversary of the Newcastle earthquake and used to raise awareness of earthquakes and to provide information on what to do in an earthquake. As Geoscience Australia jointly operates the Joint Australian Tsunami Warning Centre with the Bureau of Meteorology, the bookmark also provides information on tsunami safety. Geoscience Australia identifies and characterises potentially tsunamigenic earthquakes and this information is used to initiate the tsunami warning chain.