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  • Exposure refers to the elements at risk which may be subjected to the impact of severe hazards within a defined geographic area or region. These elements include the built environment, i.e buildings, infrastructure services and utilities, and also population and business activity. Geoscience Australia (GA) is developing the National Exposure Information System (NEXIS) as a national capability to provide an exposure profile to underpin analysis of natural hazards; potential disaster footprints, risk assessments and climate change adaptation research. The NEXIS capability enables modelling to gain a greater understanding of the impact and risk exposure to these events. The information is used to inform evidence based decision making and future planning to aid in the prevention, preparedness, response and recovery to severe hazard events and climate change adaptation. The current NEXIS database provides exposure profile on building type, building construction materials (roof and wall), number of floors, floor area, year built and population demographics, business activity (turnover) and employee numbers. NEXIS is a demonstrated capability used in response to Tropical Cyclone Yasi, Victoria Bushfires, Queensland Floods and other recent national disaster events. The database also provides input data for use with the Earthquake Risk Model (EQRM) and Tropical Cyclone Risk Model (TCRM) to estimate direct and indirect losses to the built environment and possible population casualities. Further development of the database is planned to incorporate infrastructure and facilities data to enhance the capability and availability of nationally consistent data and exposure information.

  • 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 seismicity of the Australian continent is low to moderate by world standards. However, the seismic risk is much higher for some types of Australian infrastructure. The legacy of older unreinforced masonry buildings, in particular, may contribute disproportionately to community risk. At 8:17am on the 20th April a Mw 5.0 earthquake shook Kalgoorlie. The resultant ground motion was found to vary markedly across the town with the older masonry building stock in the suburb of Boulder experiencing a greater shaking intensity than the corresponding vintage of buildings in the Kalgoorlie business district 4km away. The event has provided the best opportunity to examine the earthquake vulnerability of Australian buildings since the Newcastle Earthquake of 1989. This paper describes the event and the staged collaborative survey activity that followed. The initial reconnaissance team of two specialists captured street-view imagery of 12,000 buildings within Kalgoorlie using a vehicle mounted camera array developed by Geoscience Australia. This information subsequently informed a systematic population based building survey using PDA data collection units. The work was performed by a team of nine from the University of Adelaide, the University of Melbourne and Geoscience Australia. This paper describes the preliminary findings of the work and outlines proposed future research.

  • Effective disaster risk reduction is founded on knowledge of the underlying risk. While methods and tools for assessing risk from specific hazards or to individual assets are generally well developed, our ability to holistically assess risk to a community across a range of hazards and elements at risk remains limited. Developing a holistic view of risk requires interdisciplinary collaboration amongst a wide range of hazard scientists, engineers and social scientists, as well as engagement of a range of stakeholders. This paper explores these challenges and explores some of the common and contrasting issues sampled from a range of applications addressing earthquake, tsunami, volcano, severe wind, flood, and sea-level rise from projects in Australia, Indonesia and the Philippines. Key issues range from the availability of appropriate risk assessment tools and data, to the ability of communities to implement appropriate risk reduction measures. Quantifying risk requires information on the hazard, the exposure and the vulnerability. Often the knowledge of the hazard is reasonably well constrained, but exposure information (e.g., people and their assets) and measures of vulnerability (i.e., susceptibility to injury or damage) are inconsistent or unavailable. In order to fill these gaps, Geoscience Australia has developed computational models and tools which are open and freely available. As the knowledge gaps become smaller, the need is growing to go beyond the quantification of risk to the provision of tools to aid in selecting the most appropriate risk reduction strategies (e.g., evacuation plans, building retrofits, insurance, or land use) to build community resilience.

  • 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)

  • Geoscience Australia is currently undertaking the process to update the Australian National Earthquake Hazard Map using modern methods and an extended, more complete catalogue of Australian earthquakes. This map is a key component of Australia's earthquake loading code. The characterisation of strong ground-shaking using Ground-Motion Prediction Equations (GMPEs) underpins any earthquake hazard assessment. Recently there have been many advances in ground-motion modelling for active tectonic regions. However, the challenge for Australia - as it is for other stable continental regions - is that there are very few ground-motion recordings from large-magnitude earthquakes with which to develop empirically-based GMPEs. Consequently, there is a need to consider other numerical techniques to develop GMPEs in the absence of recorded data. Recently published Australian-specific GMPEs, which employ these numerical techniques, are now available and these will be integrated into Geoscience Australia's future hazard outputs. <p> This paper addresses several fundamental aspects related to ground-motion in Australia that are necessary to consider in the update of the National Earthquake Hazard Map, including: 1) a summary of recent advances in ground-motion modelling in Australia; 2) a comparison of Australian GMPEs against those commonly used in other stable continental regions; and 3) the impact of updated attenuation factors on local magnitudes in Australia. Specific regional and temporal aspects of magnitude calculation techniques across Australia and its affects on the earthquake catalogue will also be addressed. </p>

  • A short film about a scientific project aimed at enhancing risk analysis capacities for flood, severe wind from tropical cyclones and earthquake in the Greater Metropolitan Manila Area. Manila is one of the world's megacities, and the Greater Metro Manila Area is prone to natural disasters. These events may have devastating consequences for individuals, communities, buildings, infrastructure and economic development. Understanding the risk is essential for implementing Disaster Risk Reduction programs. In partnership with AusAID, Geoscience Australia is providing technical leadership for risk analysis projects in the Asia-Pacific Region. In the Philippines, Geoscience Australia is engaging with Government of the Philippines agencies to deliver the "Enhancing Risk Analysis Capacities for Flood, Tropical Cyclone Severe Wind and Earthquake in the Greater Metro Manila Area" Project.

  • Data package relates to tsunami modelling outputs that were used for the Catastrophic Working Group. This data relates is the underlying model development.

  • The Regional Tropical Cyclone Hazard for Infrastructure Adaptation to Climate Change project aims to provide improved estimates of tropical cyclone wind hazard in current and future climates, for use in adaptation strategies such as wind speed-based building design criteria. The overarching goal is to make practical recommendations regarding the effect of climate change on tropical cyclones. This is most effectively achieved through evaluating the effect of climate change on extreme return period wind speeds (or severe wind hazard) across tropical Australia. In this manner, the combined effects of changes in frequency, intensity and spatial distribution of tropical cyclone events are integrated into a single quantity. Return period values are used widely in building design standards, and so represent an excellent way of informing adaptation decisions. Preceding components of the project evaluated the performance of existing general circulation models to simulate aspects of the climate important for tropical cyclones. Downscaling methods were applied to these models to create climatological simulations of tropical cyclones for input into Geoscience Australia's statistical-parametric tropical cyclone model. This, in turn, provided new estimates of severe wind hazard in both current and future climates, which may be used to make recommendations for adaptation strategies on a regional basis. Achieving this goal has required a close collaboration between the University of Melbourne, CSIRO Marine and Atmospheric Research (CMAR) and Geoscience Australia. Analysis of the general circulation models and downscaling was undertaken by University of Melbourne. The downscaling was achieved using CMAR's Conformal-Cubic Atmospheric Model (CCAM). This report details the approach used by Geoscience Australia to evaluate severe wind hazard using statistical models, and analyses the effect of climate change on severe wind hazard.

  • Climate change is expected to exacerbate a range of natural hazards in Australia leading to more severe community impacts in the future. There is a need to adapt to a changing hazard environment and increasing community exposure in regions most likely influenced by climate change. Through this paper GA develops a methodology for projecting Australian communities in a spatial sense into the future. The application of this methodology is demonstrated in a case study. In order to address the fact that the impacts of climate change are expected to be more evident in the second half of this century, this model was to extend beyond the 30 year limitation of finer scale population projections, dwelling projections and development plans.