A probabilistic tsunami hazard assessement (PTHA) was developed for the island of Tongatapu, All modelled tsunamis were initiated by hypothetical thrust earthquakes on the nearby Kermadec-Tonga subduction zone. We provide raster outputs containing the inundation depth with an estimated 10% and 2% chance of being exceeded in 50 years, as well as the code used to perform the analysis [both available here: https://github.com/GeoscienceAustralia/ptha/tree/master/misc/probabilistic_inundation_tonga2020].

In 2018, Geoscience Australia updated and released the Probabilistic Tsunami Hazard Assessment (PTHA), which outlines the tsunami hazard for all of Australia and its offshore territories.

Tsunamis are unpredictable and infrequent but potentially large impact natural disasters. To prepare, mitigate and prevent losses from tsunamis, probabilistic hazard and risk analysis methods have been developed and have proved useful. However, large gaps and uncertainties still exist and many steps in the assessment methods lack information, theoretical foundation, or commonly accepted methods. Moreover, applied methods have very different levels of maturity, from already advanced probabilistic tsunami hazard analysis for earthquake sources, to less mature probabilistic risk analysis. In this review we give an overview of the current state of probabilistic tsunami hazard and risk analysis. Identifying research gaps, we offer suggestions for future research directions. An extensive literature list allows for branching into diverse aspects of this scientific approach. Appeared online in Front. Earth Sci., 29 April 2021

Many mapped faults in the south-eastern highlands of New South Wales and Victoria are associated with apparently youthful topographic ranges, suggesting that active faulting may have played a role in shaping the modern landscape. This has been demonstrated to be the case for the Lake George Fault, ~25 km east of Canberra. The age of fluvial gravels displaced across the fault indicates that relief generation of approximately 250 m has occurred in the last ca. 4 Myr. This data implies a large average slip rate by stable continental region standards (~90 m/Myr assuming a 45 degree dipping fault), and begs the question of whether other faults associated with relief in the region support comparable activity rates. Preliminary results on the age of strath terraces on the Murrumbidgee River proximal to the Murrumbidgee Fault are consistent with tens of metres of fault activity in the last ca. 200 kyr. Further south, significant thicknesses of river gravels are over-thrust by basement rocks across the Tawonga Fault and Khancoban-Yellow Bog Fault. While these sediments remain undated, prominent knick-points in the longitudinal profiles of streams crossing these faults suggest Quaternary activity commensurate with that on the Lake George Fault. More than a dozen nearby faults with similar relief are uncharacterised. Recent seismic hazard assessments for large infrastructure projects concluded that the extant paleoseismic information is insufficient to meaningfully characterise the hazard relating to regional faults in the south-eastern highlands, despite the potential for large earthquakes alluded to above. While fault locations and extents remain inconsistent across scales of geologic mapping, and active fault lengths and slip rates remain largely unquantified, the same conclusion may be drawn for other scales of seismic hazard assessment.

Indonesia is one of the most disaster prone countries in the world. For 10 years the Australian and Indonesian governments, science agencies and universities, have partnered to strengthen disaster management in Indonesia. Working together on science, technology and policy has greatly improved decision making around disaster management in Indonesia. By helping people prepare for, respond to, and recover from disasters, more lives can be saved, impacts on the most vulnerable members of society reduced, and infrastructure can be protected. Our partnership has concentrated on strengthening the evidence base for formed disaster management by improving: 1) hazard information for earthquake, tsunami, volcano and flood 2) spatial data for exposure (population, building, roads and infrastructure) 3) decision support tool (InaSAFE) to inform disaster response and management decisions. This document outlines the highlights of the Indonesian-Australian collaboration on the use of science and technology in disaster management.

Tropical cyclones present a tangible risk to Australia’s tropical coastal communities, however extratropical transition (ETT) of these storms can result in significant impacts in mid-latitude regions as well. Tropical systems are driven by latent heat release in the inner core of the cyclone. A fully tropical system is highly axisymmetric; with a warm-cored vortex that is readily represented by a simple radial profile (wind speed is a function of distance from the centre in all directions). Extratropical cyclones on the other hand are driven by strong thermal gradients and as a result have a highly asymmetric wind field that cannot be as easily parameterised for use in stochastic models. In order to accurately model the risk of these transitioning storms on communities such as Perth, the wind field of these storms needs to be parameterised for inclusion in stochastic models. These models allow large numbers of storms to be quickly simulated for use in risk modelling applications. Some authors have attempted to develop parameterisations of these wind fields, with some recent success (Loridan et al. 2015), however an implementation for the Australian region has not yet been developed. Geoscience Australia currently undertakes tropical cyclone risk assessments using a parameterised, 2D stochastic model called the Tropical Cyclone Risk Model (TCRM). TCRM uses parameterised wind fields to allow quick generation of thousands of tropical cyclones in order to develop a probabilistic understanding of tropical cyclone risk for Australia. At present, this model is not capable of simulating tropical cyclones undergoing ETT as a parameterisation of the wind field of these storms around Australia is not available. This work aims to explore ETT around Australia using a 3D, dynamical numerical weather prediction model with the ultimate goal of developing a parameterised wind field, suitable for inclusion in TCRM. This would allow risk assessments for these storms to be undertaken, and improve our understanding of the potential impact of such an event on large urban areas, such as Geraldton or Perth. A modified version of the Weather Research and Forecast (WRF) model (Hybrid WRF) was used to simulate a number of hybrid idealised tropical cyclones, and steer them to undergo ETT. Hybrid WRF was developed to facilitate control over the track and location of landfall of a tropical cyclone, by introducing a steering flow to the boundary conditions of the model run. This method was used to steer a number of idealised tropical cyclones from off the northwest coast of Western Australia, south towards Perth, with the intent to force them to undergo ETT. Surface wind fields and other environmental characteristics (minimum pressure, latitude, thermal wind components, geopotential thickness and others) were analysed to determine the phase of ETT. This case study is the first example of Hybrid WRF being used to examine ETT, and while the steering flow did move the tropical cyclones into the extratropics as intended, only one storm was observed to undergo ETT. Further development of the code for Hybrid WRF is underway, with improvements in the initial and boundary conditions identified as a means to improve the representativeness of these experiments. Based on these simulated events, we intend to develop time-evolving, storm-centred wind fields, as well as statistics on cyclone phase space parameters that can be used to determine the stage of transition to be used in a future stochastic-parametric model of tropical cyclones. Abstract submitted to/presented at the 22nd International Congress on Modelling and Simulation 2017 (MODSIM2017) - https://www.mssanz.org.au/modsim2017/

The NEAM Tsunami Hazard Model 2018 (NEAMTHM18) is a probabilistic hazard model for tsunamis generated by earthquakes. It covers the coastlines of the North-eastern Atlantic, the Mediterranean, and connected seas (NEAM). NEAMTHM18 was designed as a three-phase project. The first two phases were dedicated to the model development and hazard calculations, following a formalized decision-making process based on a multiple-expert protocol. The third phase was dedicated to documentation and dissemination. The hazard assessment workflow was structured in Steps and Levels. There are four Steps: Step-1) probabilistic earthquake model; Step-2) tsunami generation and modeling in deep water; Step-3) shoaling and inundation; Step-4) hazard aggregation and uncertainty quantification. Each Step includes a different number of Levels. Level-0 always describes the input data; the other Levels describe the intermediate results needed to proceed from one Step to another. Alternative datasets and models were considered in the implementation. The epistemic hazard uncertainty was quantified through an ensemble modeling technique accounting for alternative models’ weights and yielding a distribution of hazard curves represented by the mean and various percentiles. Hazard curves were calculated at 2,343 Points of Interest (POI) distributed at an average spacing of ∼20 km. Precalculated probability maps for five maximum inundation heights (MIH) and hazard intensity maps for five average return periods (ARP) were produced from hazard curves. In the entire NEAM Region, MIHs of several meters are rare but not impossible. Considering a 2% probability of exceedance in 50 years (ARP≈2,475 years), the POIs with MIH >5 m are fewer than 1% and are all in the Mediterranean on Libya, Egypt, Cyprus, and Greece coasts. In the North-East Atlantic, POIs with MIH >3 m are on the coasts of Mauritania and Gulf of Cadiz. Overall, 30% of the POIs have MIH >1 m. NEAMTHM18 results and documentation are available through the TSUMAPS-NEAM project website (http://www.tsumaps-neam.eu/), featuring an interactive web mapper. Although the NEAMTHM18 cannot substitute in-depth analyses at local scales, it represents the first action to start local and more detailed hazard and risk assessments and contributes to designing evacuation maps for tsunami early warning. Appeared online in Front. Earth Sci., 05 March 2021.

The Australian Flood Risk Information Portal (the portal) is an initiative of the Australian Government, established following the devastating floods across Eastern Australia in 2011. The portal is a key component of the National Flood Risk Information Project (NFRIP), and aims to provide a single point of access to Australian flood information. Currently much of Australia's existing flood information is dispersed across disparate sources, making it difficult to find and access. The portal will host data and tools that allow public discovery, visualisation and retrieval of flood studies, flood maps, satellite derived water observations and other related information, all from a single location. The portal will host standards and guidelines for use by jurisdictions and information custodians to encourage best practice in the development of new flood risk information. While the portal will initially host existing flood information, the architecture has been designed to allow the portal content to grow over time to meet the needs of users. The aim is for the portal to display data for a range of scenarios from small to extreme events, though this will be dependent on stakeholder contributions. Geoscience Australia's Australian Flood Studies Database is the portal's data store of flood study information. The database includes metadata created through a purpose-built data entry application, and over time, information harvested from state-operated catalogues. For each entry the portal provides a summary of the flood study, including information on how the study was done, what data was used, what flood maps were produced and for what scenarios, as well as details on the custodian and originating author. If the study included an assessment of damage, details such as estimates of annual average damage, or the number of properties affected during a flood of a particular likelihood will also be included. During the last phase of development downloadable flood study reports and their associated flood maps have been added to the portal where available. As the portal is populated it will increasingly host mapped flood data, or link to flood data and maps held in authoritative databases hosted by State and Territory bodies. Mapping data to be made accessible through the portal will include flood extents and to a lesser degree information on water depths. The portal will also include water observations obtained from Geoscience Australia's historic archive of Landsat imagery. This data will show whether a particular location was 'wet' at some point during the past 30 years. While this imagery does not necessarily represent the peak of a flood or show water depth, the data will support the validation and verification process of hydrologic and hydraulic flood modelling. This work will prove useful particularly in rural areas where there is little or no flood information. The portal also provides flood information custodians with the ability to either upload mapped data directly to the portal or to make this data accessible via web services. Data management tools and standards, developed through NFRIP, will enable data custodians to map their data to agreed standards for delivery through the portal. A portal framework and supporting principles has been developed to guide the maintenance and development of the portal.

The Flood Study Summary Services support discovery and retrieval of flood hazard information. The services return metadata and data for flood studies and flood inundation maps held in the 'Australian Flood Studies Database'. The same information is available through a user interface at http://www.ga.gov.au/flood-study-web/. A 'flood study' is a comprehensive technical investigation of flood behaviour. It defines the nature and extent flood hazard across the floodplain by providing information on the extent, level and velocity of floodwaters and on the distribution of flood flows. Flood studies are typically commissioned by government, and conducted by experts from specialist engineering firms or government agencies. Key outputs from flood studies include detailed reports, and maps showing inundation, depth, velocity and hazard for events of various likelihoods. The services are deliverables fom the National Flood Risk Information Project. The main aim of the project is to make flood risk information accessible from a central location. Geoscience Australia will facilitate this through the development of the National Flood Risk Information Portal. Over the four years the project will launch a new phase of the portal prior to the commencement of each annual disaster season. Each phase will increase the amount of flood risk information that is publicly accessible and increase stakeholder capability in the production and use of flood risk information. flood-study-search returns summary layers and links to rich metadata about flood maps and the studies that produced them. flood-study-map returns layers for individual flood inundation maps. Typically a single layer shows the flood inundation for a particular likelihood or historical event in a flood study area. To retrieve flood inundation maps from these services, we recommend: 1. querying flood-study-search to obtain flood inundation map URIs, then 2. using the flood inundation map URIs to retrieve maps separately from flood-study-map. The ownership of each flood study remains with the commissioning organisation and/or author as indicated with each study, and users of the database should refer to the reports themselves to determine any constraints in their usage.

This dataset contains hotspot point data, derived from satellite-born instruments that detect light in the thermal wavelengths found on the Digital Earth Australia Hotspots application. Typically, satellite data are processed with a specific algorithm that highlights areas with an unusually high temperature. Hotspot sources include the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) sensor aboard the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Terra and Aqua satellites, the Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer (AVHRR) night time imagery from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) satellites, the Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) on the Suomi- NPP satellite. Please note: As these data are stored on a Corporate system, we are only able to supply the web services (see download links). email earth.observation@ga.gov.au.