In order to understand the effects a natural or man-made disaster could have on a community we need to know as much as we can about the people and buildings that occupy that area. This includes information about: People: how many people will be affected and where they live Buildings: the type of construction materials used, the number of storeys, and age all contribute to how a building withstands damage Cost : how much will it cost to rebuild a house or replace contents if damaged This information is used to not only investigate physical impacts of a disaster, but also forms base information that is needed to help inform the socio-economic impacts, such as loss to the business community when impacted by severe cyclonic wind storms. This information is used when calculating the risk from natural and man-made disasters in order to inform policy and operational decision makers of the impact on Australian communities. The National Exposure Information System (NEXIS) aims to capture this information to create up-to-date aggregated exposure data based upon building level for all residential, commercial and industrial building in Australia. Geoscience Australia (GA) embarked on the development of the National Exposure Information System (NEXIS) project in response to the Council of Australian Governments (COAG) reform commitment on Australia's ability to manage natural disasters and other emergencies. The COAG commitment was for the establishment of a nationally consistent system of data collection, research and analysis to ensure a sound knowledge base on natural disasters and disaster mitigation - (DOTARS 2002). NEXIS is also an important component for improving several projects of national interest within Geoscience Australia (GA). These include the Disaster Resilience Advice Information (DRAI), Climate hazards and Risk Section (CHRS) and the Vulnerability, Resilience and Mitigation (VRM) which investigate natural and man-made risks and their impacts on the community. NEXIS information is available at Local Government Are (LGA) & Statistical Area Level 2 (SA2)

The impacts of climate change, including sea level rise and the increased frequency of storm surge events, will adversely affect infrastructure in a significant number of Australian coastal communities. In order to quantify this risk and develop suitable adaptation strategies, the Department of Climate Change and Energy Efficiency (DCCEE) commissioned the National Coastal Vulnerability Assessment (NCVA). With contributions from Geoscience Australia (GA) and the University of Tasmania, this first-pass national assessment has identified the extent and value of infrastructure that are potentially vulnerable to impacts of climate change. A number of fundamental national scale datasets underpinned the NCVA. A mid-resolution digital elevation model was used to model a series of sea level rise projections incorporating 1 in 100 year storm-tide estimates where available. The model outputs were overlain with a national coastal geomorphology dataset, titled the Smartline. The Smartline identified coastal landforms that are potentially unstable and may recede under the influence of rising sea level. These datasets were then overlain with Geoscience Australia's National Exposure Information System (NEXIS) to quantify the number and value of infrastructure elements (including residential and commercial buildings, roads and rail) potentially vulnerable to a range of sea-level rise and recession estimates for the year 2100.

Geoscience Australia (GA) is currently undertaking a process of revising the Australian National Earthquake Hazard Map using modern methods and an updated catalogue of Australian earthquakes. This map is a key component of Australia's earthquake loading standard, AS1170.4. Here we present an overview of work being undertaken within the GA Earthquake Hazard Project towards delivery of the next generation earthquake hazard map. Knowledge of the recurrence and magnitude (including maximum magnitude) of historic and pre-historic earthquakes is fundamental to any Probabilistic Seismic Hazard Assessment (PSHA). Palaeoseismological investigation of neotectonic features observed in the Australian landscape has contributed to the development of a Neotectonic Domains model which describes the variation in large intraplate earthquake recurrence behaviour across the country. Analysis of fault data from each domain suggests that maximum magnitude earthquakes of MW 7.0-7.5±0.2 can occur anywhere across the continent. In addition to gathering information on the pre-historic record, more rigorous statistical analyses of the spatial distribution of the historic catalogue are also being undertaken. Earthquake magnitudes in Australian catalogues were determined using disparate magnitude formulae, with many local magnitudes determined using Richter attenuation coefficients prior to about 1990. Consequently, efforts are underway to standardise magnitudes for specific regions and temporal periods, and to convert all earthquakes in the catalogue to moment magnitude. Finally, we will review the general procedure for updating the national earthquake hazard map, including consideration of Australian-specific ground-motion prediction equations. We will also examine the sensitivity of hazard estimates to the assumptions of certain model components in the hazard assessment.

The Rapid Inventory Collection System (RICS) is a vehicular data collection system (image and GPS) used for building/infrastructure damage and inventory assessment. The system consists of Ethernet cameras attached to a tripod mounted on a motor vehicle, a GPS receiver and software written in C++. The RICS data was used by the 2009 Victorian Bushfires Royal Commission for the impact assessment (field survey) which quantified the extent and severity of the damage caused by the fire-storm.

The impacts of climate change, including sea level rise and the increased frequency of storm surge events, will adversely affect infrastructure in a significant number of Australian coastal communities. In order to quantify this risk and develop suitable adaptation strategies, the Department of Climate Change and Energy Efficiency (DCCEE) commissioned the National Coastal Vulnerability Assessment (NCVA). With contributions from Geoscience Australia (GA) and the University of Tasmania, this first-pass national assessment has identified the extent and value of infrastructure that is potentially vulnerable to impacts of climate change. In addition, the NCVA examined the changes in exposure under a range of future population scenarios. The NCVA was underpinned by a number of fundamental national scale datasets; a mid-resolution digital elevation model (DEM) used to model a series of sea level rise projections incorporating 1 in 100 year storm-tide estimates where available; the 'Smartline' (nationa; coastal geomorphology dataset) identified coastal landforms that are potentially unstable and may recede with the influence of rising sea level. The inundation outputs were then overlain with GA's National Exposure Information System to quantify the number and value of infrastructure elements (including residential and commercial buildings, roads and rail) potentially vulnerable to a range of sea-level rise and recession estimates for the year 2100.

The datasets contain spatial locations in point format as a representation of embassies, high commissions and consulate facilities/missions in Australia.

The dataset contains the spatial locations, in point format, of Australia's major international, domestic and regional airport terminals.

The report presents a framework for assessng in quantitative terms the cost of the weather related hazards of severe wind, flood inundation, storm surge, bushfire and hail. It has been developed with reference to the risk assessment approaches used by the insurance and catastrophic loss modelling industry. For each hazard the specific data inputs to each component of the impacts framework are summarised as a list of implementation needs. Finally, the report identifies areas where impact models are immature or not readily available in the public domain.

Power point presentation given to a meeting of earthquake hazard model stakeholders, in Sydney on July 22nd 2008.

A model to assess severe wind hazard using climate-simulated wind speeds has been recently completed at Geoscience Australia. The model can calculate return period of wind speeds over a given region considering current as well as future climate conditions. The winds extracted from the climate simulations are winds at 10m height over open terrain. In hazard studies it is important however, to refer the wind speeds to the characteristics of the given location in order to calculate the actual severe wind hazard at the regional level. This is achieved by multiplying the generic wind hazard by a number of wind multipliers. One of those multipliers is wind direction. The wind direction multiplier recognises the prevailing direction of the strongest winds and affects the wind hazard accordingly. Lower wind hazard would correspond to the direction of low wind speeds. In practical applications engineers calculate the wind load in structures by multiplying the design wind speeds recommended by the Australian/NZ standards for wind loading in structures (AS/NZS 1170.2:2010) by some generic multipliers also given in the standards. The multipliers have been developed considering a number of Bureau of Meteorology (BoM) weather recording stations at particular locations in Australia; this method cannot capture the actual regional characteristics in such a vast country like Australia. In this paper we propose a new methodology for calculation of wind direction multipliers based on wind speeds and direction extracted from climate simulations. Our method allows a more realistic assessment of the wind direction multiplier at a particular region.