Roger Mentha

End-user
About
Roger Mentha

Lead end user

Over three years, the project focused on the nature of catastrophic disasters and how they are conceptualised in the Australian context; the historical frequency of compound disasters in Australia; the most appropriate practices to plan and prepare for catastrophic disasters; and how businesses and community organisations can best be incorporated into planning and preparedness arrangements for catastrophic disasters. The key finding from this research is that existing principles for disaster planning and risk reduction are not effectively implemented to develop plans that consistently inform decision making. To improve this, a key utilisation output from the research has been an emergency management capability maturity assessment tool that can be utilised by governments and organisations to better understand potential capability gaps in the context of severe-to-catastrophic disaster scenarios. Outcomes of the research were presented as evidence to the Royal Commission into National Natural Disaster Arrangements.
Research team:
The project demonstrated a pilot capability to deliver wind and rain impact forecasts for residential housing from an ensemble of weather prediction models runs. The project focused on the wind and rainfall impact from the 20-22 April 2015 East Coast Low in New South Wales. Through the utilisation of Geoscience Australia’s HazImp software, the research team developed and tested a workflow that integrated the numerical weather forecasts, vulnerability relationships and exposure data at the community level. The project set up the end-to-end workflow from wind and rain hazard to spatial impact. These spatial impact outputs were delivered into the Visual Weather system at the Bureau of Meteorology, foreshadowing the possibility of easily achievable future visualisation to operational meteorologists.

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