@article {bnh-3283, title = {Natural hazards in Australia: floods}, journal = {Climatic Change}, volume = {139}, year = {2016}, month = {11/2016}, pages = {21-35}, chapter = {21}, abstract = {

Floods are caused by a number of interacting factors, making it remarkably difficult to explain changes in flood hazard. This paper reviews the current understanding of historical trends and variability in flood hazard across Australia. Links between flood and rainfall trends cannot be made due to the influence of climate processes over a number of spatial and temporal scales as well as landscape changes that affect the catchment response. There are also still considerable uncertainties in future rainfall projections, particularly for sub-daily extreme rainfall events. This is in addition to the inherent uncertainty in hydrological modelling such as antecedent conditions and feedback mechanisms.

Research questions are posed based on the current state of knowledge. These include a need for high-resolution climate modelling studies and efforts in compiling and analysing databases of sub-daily rainfall and flood records. Finally there is a need to develop modelling frameworks that can deal with the interaction between climate processes at different spatio-temporal scales, so that historical flood trends can be better explained and future flood behaviour understood.

}, doi = {10.1007/s10584-016-1689-y}, url = {http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10584-016-1689-y}, author = {Fiona Johnson and Christopher J. White and Albert van Dijk and Marie Ekstrom and Jason P. Evans and Doerte Jakob and Anthony S. Kiem and M. Leonard and Alexandra Rouillard and Seth Westra} } @conference {bnh-1889, title = {Deaggregating the differences between seismic hazard assessments at a single site}, booktitle = {Australian Earthquake Engineering Society Conference 2014}, year = {2014}, abstract = {

In the last few years there have been several probabilistic seismic hazard assessments (PSHA) of Adelaide. The resulting 500 year PGA obtained are 0.059, 0.067, 0.109 and 0.141. The differences between the first three are readily accounted for by choice of GMPE, how faults are included and differences in recurrence estimation, with each of these having a similar level of importance. As no GMPEs exist for the Mt Lofty and Flingers Ranges the choices of GMPEs were all based on geological analogies. The choice of at what weighting to include low attenuation, that is a stable continental crust, GMPE was most important. At a return period of 500 year the inclusion of faults was not necessarily significant. The choice of whether the faults behaved with Characteristic or Gutenberg-Richter recurrence statistics had the highest impact on the hazard with the choice of slip rate the next most important. A low slip rate Characteristic fault, while increasing the hazard for longer return periods (i.e. >=2500 years), results in only a minor increase at 500 years. The magnitude frequency distribution b-value for the four studies were 1.043, 0.88, 0.915 and 0.724. For the same activity in the magnitude range of 3.0 to 3.5, the activity level at M 6.0 is an order of magnitude higher for a b-value of 0.724 compared to a b-value of 1.043. This increase in activity rate of larger earthquakes significantly increases the hazard. The average of the first three studies is 0.078{\textpm}0.022 (0.056 {\textendash}0.100) g. This range is reflecting the intrinsic uncertainty in calculating PSHAs where many of the inputs are poorly constrained. The results for the highest hazard level PSHA study (i.e. 0.141g) can be explained by their use of a low b-value (i.e. 0.724).

}, author = {M. Leonard and Ryan D. Hoult and Somerville, P and G. Gibson and D. Sandiford and Helen M. Goldsworthy and Elisa Lumantarna and S. Spiliopoulos} }