• Natural Hazards and Earth System Sciences
• DOI 10.5194/nhess-21-893-2021
• 30 March 2021

We present the formulation of an open-source, statistical–parametric model of tropical cyclones (TCs) for use in hazard and risk assessment applications. We demonstrate the capability of the model to replicate observed behaviour of TCs, including coastal landfall rates which are of significant importance for risk assessments.

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• Natural Hazards and Earth System Sciences
• DOI 10.5194/nhess-21-683-2021
• 10 March 2021

In this study we present a unique 10  year climatology of severe convective storm tracks for a large European area covering Germany, France, Belgium and Luxembourg. For the period 2005–2014, a high-resolution hail potential composite of 1×1 km2 is produced from two-dimensional radar reflectivity and lightning data.

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• Natural Hazards and Earth System Sciences
• DOI 10.5194/nhess-21-481-2021
• 19 February 2021

Building on almost 10 years of expertise and operational application of the Combined Drought Indicator (CDI), which is implemented within the European Commission’s European Drought Observatory (EDO) for the purposes of early warning and monitoring of agricultural droughts in Europe, this paper proposes a revised version of the index.

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• Natural Hazards and Earth System Sciences
• DOI 10.5194/nhess-21-171-2021
• 8 February 2021

Extreme weather events are generally associated with unusual dynamical conditions, yet the signal-to-noise ratio of the dynamical aspects of climate change that are relevant to extremes appears to be small, and the nature of the change can be highly uncertain.

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• Natural Hazards and Earth System Sciences
• DOI 10.5194/nhess-20-3521-2020
• 15 January 2021

This work proposes methods for reducing the computational requirements of hydrological simulations for the estimation of very rare floods that occur on average less than once in 1000 years. These methods enable the analysis of long streamflow time series (here for example 10 000 years) at low computational costs and with modelling uncertainty. They are to be used within continuous simulation frameworks with long input time series and are readily transferable to similar simulation tasks.

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• Natural Hazards and Earth System Sciences
• DOI 10.5194/nhess-20-3413-2020
• 12 January 2021

Landslides cause thousands of fatalities and cost billions of dollars of damage worldwide every year, but different inventories of landslide events can have widely diverging completeness. This can lead to spatial biases in our understanding of the impacts. Here we use a globally homogeneous model of landslide hazard and exposure to provide consistent estimates of where landslides are most likely to cause damage to people, roads and other critical infrastructure at 1 km resolution.

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• Natural Hazards and Earth System Sciences
• DOI 10.5194/nhess-20-3197-2020
• 25 December 2020

Satellite radar could provide information on landslide locations within days of an earthquake or rainfall event anywhere on Earth, but until now there has been a lack of systematic testing of possible radar methods, and most methods have been demonstrated using a single case study event and data from a single satellite sensor. Here we test five methods on four events, demonstrating their wide applicability and making recommendations on when different methods should be applied in the future.

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• Natural Hazards and Earth System Sciences
• DOI 10.5194/nhess-20-2415-2020
• 13 October 2020

The geometry of estuaries is often altered through dredging to make room for ships and with extensive landfill over wetlands to enable development. Here, we use historical maps to help create computational models of seawater flow around and into a lagoonal bay of New York City for the 1880s and 2010s. Our results show that these past man-made changes cause higher coastal storm tides and that they result specifically from deeper depths, expanded inlet width, and landfill.

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• Natural Hazards and Earth System Sciences
• DOI 10.5194/nhess-20-2365-2020
• 22 September 2020

Forecasting of daily fire weather indices driven by the ECMWF ensemble prediction system is shown to have a good skill up to 10 d ahead in predicting flammable conditions in most regions of the world. The availability of these forecasts through the Copernicus Emergency Management Service can extend early warnings by up to 1–2 weeks, allowing for greater proactive coordination of resource-sharing and mobilization within and across countries.

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• Natural Hazards and Earth System Sciences
• DOI 10.5194/nhess-20-2175-2020
• 27 August 2020

There is increasing interest and need to analyze the contribution of anthropogenic climate change to negative impacts of climate change. We study the case of glacial lake Palcacocha in Peru, which poses a significant flood risk to the city of Huaraz. We found that greenhouse gas emissions; strong urbanization processes without appropriate land use planning; and social, cultural, political, and institutional factors all contribute to the existing flood risk.

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