A presentation delivered at the Australia Reinsurance Pool Corporation / Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (ARPC/OECD) Terrorism Risk Insurance Conference held in Canberra from 6-7 October 2016. The presentation focusses on GA's work with the ARPC in developing a capability to estimate insured losses due to blast in Australian cities.

<div>The Severe Wind Hazard Assessment for South East Queensland (SWHA-SEQ) analysed risk from severe wind events in a marginal tropical cyclone (TC) region with a large exposed population, and historical severe thunderstorm and TC impacts. SWHA-SEQ was a collaborative effort bringing together 15 partners across government, academia and the insurance sector to improve the collective understanding of wind risk in the region and inform future strategies to reduce this risk, in the context of climate change, urban planning and socio-economic status of the population. </div><div>The project involved enhancing the understanding of hazard, exposure and physical vulnerability to strengthen the comprehension of risk, including local-scale wind hazard from thunderstorm and TC wind gusts, and a semi-quantitative analysis of future wind hazard. Structural characteristics of residential housing stock were updated through a combination of street surveys, national databases of built assets and insurance portfolio statistics. Vulnerability models for residential houses including retrofitted models for 5 common house types were developed, alongside identification of key vulnerability factors for residential strata buildings.</div><div>Local governments are building on the outcomes of the project, with the City of Gold Coast using the project outcomes as the key evidence base for a A$100m investment over 7 years to advocate for uplift of building design criteria, targeted community engagement and resilience of City-owned infrastructure. Other local governments have conducted specific exercises exploring how they would manage a severe TC impact. The investments and activities directly flowing from SWHA-SEQ are testament to the partner engagement through the project. Presented at the 2024 Symposium on Hurricane Risk in a Changing Climate (SHRCC2024)

<div>To set out how Geoscience Australia is meeting its vision for the Exploring for the Future program, we have summarised the ways our scientific activities, outputs and intended outcomes and impacts are linked, using the Impact Pathway diagram. This updated brochure includes program impact infographics.</div>

The Tropical Cyclone Scenario Selection tool enables users (e.g. emergency managers, engineers, researchers, etc.) to query the catalogue of tropical cyclone scenarios, developed as part of the 2018 Tropical Cyclone Hazard Assessment (TCHA18). The TCHA18 catalogue is comprised of 10,000 simulated years of tropical cyclone activity in the Australian region, amounting to over 160,000 tropical cyclone events. Using the search tools, the tracks and wind fields of individual events affecting a location or region can be discovered and explored. The returned scenarios are retrieved from a catalogue of synthetic tropical cyclones and can queried within the map and/or downloaded in various formats for follow-on analysis.

Strong surface wind gusts and heavy rain are meteorological hazards that are predominantly produced by storms such as east coast lows, tropical cyclones or thunderstorms. Interest in these hazards from a response agency point of view lies in their impact on the natural and built environment. At present, weather forecast models still predict mostly 'raw' meteorological output such as surface wind speeds at certain times, or rain accumulations over a specified period. This model output needs to be combined with exposure and vulnerability information to translate the forecast hazard into predicted impact. The Bushfire and Natural Hazards CRC project Impact-based forecasting for the coastal zone: East-Coast Lows attempts to demonstrate a pilot capability to deliver impact forecasts for residential housing from an ensemble of weather prediction models runs. The project is a collaborative effort between the Australian Bureau of Meteorology and Geoscience Australia. The project is initially focusing on the wind and rainfall impact from the 20-22 April 2015 east coast low event in NSW. The wind and rainfall hazard data are provided by a 24-member ensemble of the ACCESS model on a 1.3 km grid, with damage data acquired from NSW State Emergency Services (SES) and the Emergency Information Coordination Unit (EICU) for the 2015 event. We will show that the multi-hazard nature of an east coast low event makes attributing the observed building damage to a single hazard difficult. Wind damage to residential housing in this case is largely due to tree fall. This 'damage-by-intermediary' mechanism requires not just the knowledge of building properties in an exposed area, but also additional knowledge of the surrounding vegetation and its response to strong winds. We will discuss enhancements to the SES/EICU damage survey templates that would lead to improvements in the development of the hazard-damage relationships. Abstract presented at the 2018 Bushfire and Natural Hazards CRC (bnhcrc) and Australasian Fire And Emergency Services Authorities Council (AFAC) Conference

Limited data from emergency services for the April 2015 East Coast Low (ECL) event initially investigated. SES call-out data provides spatial coverage, but does not capture detail of the damage to buildings. EICU data has detailed information, including indicative damage state, but limited spatial coverage. Neither dataset consistently links the damage to the hazard that caused it. Showing that the impact forecasting process adds value beyond the underlying hazard forecasts in this situation is challenging. EICU data can help to calibrate the vulnerability functions applied to model-based hazard forecast data. The SES callout data can help evaluate whether the indicative damage rates for an area are reasonable, through use of a service demand metric. Service demand is the number of callouts compared to the number of buildings for a statistical area (e.g. mesh block, SA1 or local government area). We use the total building count in each area, as the SES callout data does not differentiate between residential and non-residential buildings. It also includes callouts for downed trees or power lines that may not have directly caused structural damage to buildings. Service demand is compared to mesh block-based impact forecast data for the 2015 ECL, using existing heuristic vulnerability functions for severe wind. We recognise these functions are not calibrated against forecast model data, but provide a starting point from which we can establish the workflow while working towards refined vulnerability functions in parallel. The project has sourced EICU and SES post-event survey data, and high-resolution model (reanalysis) data for two additional severe wind and rain events to improve the calibration of the vulnerability functions. Poster presentation at the 2019 AFAC Conference

This report presents the results of research conducted by Geoscience Australia (GA) in Bundaberg following the January 2013 floods. The report covers responses from both householders who were either inundated by the flood waters or who were fortunate to have escaped inundation. Irrespective of the inundation status, Bundaberg’s householders were still impacted by the flood event. Some may not have been able to access their place of work; some may have experienced physical and mental health issues. The report also discusses the impact of the flood on Bundaberg’s business community.

Wind multipliers are factors that transform wind speeds over open, flat terrain (regional wind speeds) to local wind speeds that consider the effects of direction, terrain (surface roughness), shielding (buildings and structures) and topography (hills and ridges). During the assessment of local wind hazards (spatial significance in the order 10's of metres), wind multipliers allow for regional wind speeds (order 10 to 100's of kilometres) to be factored to provide local wind speeds. <b>Value: </b>The wind multiplier data is used in modelling the impacts (i.e. physical damage) of wind-related events such as tropical cyclones (an input for Tropical Cyclone Risk assessment), thunderstorms and other windstorms. <b>Scope: </b>Includes terrain, shielding and topographic multipliers for national coverage. Each multiplier further contains 8 directions.

Australian Community Climate and Earth-System (ACCESS) Numerical Weather Prediction (NWP) data is made available by the Bureau of Meteorology for registered subscribers such as GA. ACCESS-C3 (City) model is a forecast-only model performed every 6 hours and consists of grid coordinates covering domains around Sydney, Victoria and Tasmania, Brisbane, Perth, Adelaide and Darwin. ACCESS Impact Modelling (ACCESS-IM) System utilise information from ACCESS-NWP on the forecast wind gust speeds ground surface (single-level) at 10 metres, simulated by the ACCESS-C3 model, for the time period of 0-12, 12-24, 24-36, 0-36.

Australian Community Climate and Earth-System (ACCESS) Numerical Weather Prediction (NWP) data is made available by the Bureau of Meteorology for registered subscribers such as GA. ACCESS-C3 (City) model is a forecast-only model performed every 6 hours and consists of grid coordinates covering domains around Sydney, Victoria and Tasmania, Brisbane, Perth, Adelaide and Darwin. ACCESS Impact Modelling (ACCESS-IM) System utilise information from ACCESS-NWP on the forecast wind gust speeds ground surface (single-level) at 10 metres, simulated by the ACCESS-C3 model, for the time period of 0-12, 12-24, 24-36, 0-36.