The WRN Natural Hazard and Risk programme identifies and quantifies risks to exposed assets and populations at global and local scales. These assessments are incorporated into financial and operational decision support systems including catastrophe risk and internal economic capital models within insurance companies. This works informs decisions on risk retention, diversification and transfer strategy, including reinsurance transactions.
The Research Programme assesses the distribution, frequency and intensity of extremes across the full range hydro-meteorological and geo hazards; the vulnerabilities of exposed assets and populations and their financial impact.
Date: Apr 18, 2013 | Type: Article |
Ext. Link: Click Here ›
Pillar: Natural Hazard & Risk
Hub: Other Perils
Authors: Rob Parker and Dave Petley
Fields: Landslide
Summary: The Mw = 7.8 earthquake in early April in Iran was the largest event in that country for about 50 years. Fortunately, the depth of the earthquake (82 km) and the low population density in the affected areas meant that loss of life was low for an event of this size
Date: Mar 19, 2013 | Type: Paper |
Journal: Climate Dynamics | Ext. Link: Click Here ›
Pillar: Natural Hazard & Risk
Hub: Tropical Cyclones
Authors: Greg Holland, Cindy L. Bruyère
Fields:
Summary: Recent community consensus has concluded that it is likely that the frequency of intense hurricanes will increase with future anthropogenic climate change. IPCC (2007) also concluded that the current ‘warming of the climate system is unequivocal’. Yet IPCC (2012) concluded that ‘There is low confidence in any observed long-term increases in tropical cyclone activity’, based largely on potential errors in the observed data. Here we investigate this apparent anomaly and find that there has been an increase in the proportion of intense hurricanes relative to all hurricanes, and that is strongly related to an Anthropogenic Climate Change Index (ACCI).
Date: Mar 01, 2013 | Type: Paper |
Journal: Physica A | Ext. Link: Click Here ›
Pillar: Natural Hazard & Risk
Hub: Flood
Authors: Francesco Serinaldi, Chris G. Kilsby
Fields:
Summary: The Allan factor (AF) is a statistic widely used to assess if the rate of occurrences of an event tends to cluster and show persistence in a range of space and/or time scales. This study investigates the sampling distribution function of the AF estimator when the underlying process is homogeneous Poissonian.
Date: Feb 18, 2013 | Type: Article | Attachment: Download File ›
Conf: International Conference on Structural Safety & Reliability (ICOSSAR) |
Pillar: Natural Hazard & Risk
Hub: Exposure, Vulnerability & Physical Impacts
Authors: K. Porter, I.H. Cho
Fields: Vulnerability
Summary: The abstract summarizes a procedure for creating an analytically derived seismic vulnerability function using 2nd-generation performance-based earthquake engineering at practical cost, with mathematical rigor, reflecting all of the most-important variability within the class.
Date: Jan 29, 2013 | Type: Paper |
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Pillar: Natural Hazard & Risk
Hub: Tropical Cyclones
Authors: IBHS
Fields:
Summary: Insurance Institute for Business and Home Safety (IBHS), a WRN partner released three new papers focusing on building codes in New York and New Jersey; guidance for repairing and rebuilding residential and commercial structures post-Sandy; and business protection lessons learned from Sandy. These papers contain valuable information related to building codes in New York and New Jersey and highlights the importance of building mitigation measures to wind and flood.
Date: Jan 04, 2013 | Type: Article |
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Pillar: Natural Hazard & Risk
Hub: Earthquake
Authors: James Daniell and Armand Vervaeck
Fields:
Summary: The purpose of this report is to present the damaging earthquakes in the year 2012 around the world that were entered into the CATDAT Damaging Earthquake Database (a historical global catastrophe database compiled by our WRN partners CEDIM and KIT amongst others) in terms of their socio‐economic effects.
Date: Dec 10, 2012 | Type: Paper | Attachment: Download File ›
Pillar: Natural Hazard & Risk
Hub: Tropical Cyclones
Authors: Dr. Habil. Michael Kunz & Prasad Gunturi
Fields:
Summary: Sandy was a storm system with special meteorological characteristics causing widespread damage from the Caribbean to the U.S. East Coast. At the U.S. coast, especially in New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania, Sandy resulted in a relatively high death toll compared to historic events. Critical infrastructure failures (electricity, transportation) are expected to lead to a high amount of indirect damages.
Date: Nov 30, 2012 | Type: Article | Attachment: Download File ›
Pillar: Natural Hazard & Risk
Hub: Flood
Authors: Erwann Michel-Kerjan & Carolyn Kousky
Fields:
Summary: Flood Insurance Coverage in New York and New Jersey
Date: Nov 08, 2012 | Type: Paper | Attachment: Download File ›
Pillar: Natural Hazard & Risk
Hub: Tropical Cyclones
Authors: Chris Kilsby
and Jim Hall. Bernhard Mühr. Michael Kunz, Tina Kunz -Plapp, James Daniell, Bijan Khazai, Marjorie Vannieuwenhuyse, Tina Comes, Florian Elmer, Kai Schröter, Adrian Leyser, Christian Lucas, Joachim Fohringer, Thomas Münzberg, Werner Trieselmann, Jochen Zschau
Fields:
Summary: Hurricane Sandy was a storm system with special meteorlogical characteristics. It caused widespread damage from the Caribbean to the U.S. East Coast.
Date: Nov 02, 2012 | Type: Paper |
Journal: Environmental Research Letters | Ext. Link: Click Here ›
Pillar: Natural Hazard & Risk
Hub: Natural Disasters & Climate Adapation
Authors: Emily Black, Pier Luigi Vidale, Anne Verhoef,Santiago Vianna Cuadra, Tom Osborne and Catherine Van den Hoof
Fields:
Summary: As fossil fuel prices increase, energy crops will become an increasingly lucrative option for farmers. Exploring the long-term environmental consequences of such cultivation is therefore a high priority. This paper applies a process-based crop model to sugarcane in Ghana (where cultivation is planned), and the São Paulo region of Brazil (which has a well-established sugarcane industry) to understand the impact this could have in areas of vulnerable water resource and long term environmental sustainability
Date: Nov 01, 2012 | Type: Article | Attachment: Download File ›
Pillar: Natural Hazard & Risk
Hub: Tropical Cyclones
Authors: James Done, Jeffrey Czajkowski
Fields: Atmospheric
Summary: This study provides new insights into the drivers of hurricane losses that have implications for existing approaches to hurricane loss modeling.
Date: Oct 31, 2012 | Type: Paper | Attachment: Download File ›
Pillar: Natural Hazard & Risk
Hub: Tropical Cyclones
Authors: Prof David B. Stephenson; Dr. Leon Hermanson; Dr Angelika Werner
Fields:
Summary: A two page paper looking at the impact of North Atlantic Oscillation on European Windstorms
Date: Oct 10, 2012 | Type: Paper | Attachment: Download File ›
Pillar: Natural Hazard & Risk
Hub: Earthquake
Authors: Keith A. Porter, Edward H. Field, and Kevin Milner
Fields: Earthquake
Summary: Exposures with very large sums insured, such as those dealt through Facultative reinsurance, require particular studies when assessing their seismic risk. A more accurate risk assessment may be translated in better reinsurance pricing due to the consideration of a wider range of uncertainties. A thorough hazard analysis requires a Probabilistic Seismic Hazard Assessment (PSHA) which in some cases may be computationally demanding and time consuming to set up.
Date: Oct 04, 2012 | Type: Article | Attachment: Download File ›
Pillar: Natural Hazard & Risk
Hub: Flood
Authors: Jeffrey Czajkowski & Vaughn Jensen
Fields:
Summary: Assessing the Feasibility of U.S. Private Market Flood Insurance - a study by WRN partner Wharton Risk Management and Decision Processes Center.
Date: Sep 25, 2012 | Type: Article |
Journal: Journal of Hydrology | Ext. Link: Click Here ›
Pillar: Natural Hazard & Risk
Hub: Flood
Authors: Francesco Serinaldi, Chris G. Kilsby
Fields: Flood
Summary: This study introduces a class of stochastic multisite monthly rainfall generators devised for application in water resources management problems, such as the sensitivity analysis of droughts and extreme rainfall scenarios under external climatic and non climatic forcing mechanisms.
Date: Aug 31, 2012 | Type: Paper |
Journal: Renewable Energy, Volume 44, August 2012 | Ext. Link: Click Here ›
Pillar: Natural Hazard & Risk
Hub: Science & Innovation
Authors: Raquel Garcia Gonzaleza, Anne Verhoefa, Pier Luigi Vidaleb, Bruce Maina, Guogui Ganc, Yupeng Wuc
Fields:
Summary: There is currently an increased interest of Government and Industry in the UK, as well as at the European Community level and International Agencies (i.e. Department of Energy, American International Energy Agency), to improve the performance and uptake of Ground Coupled Heat Pumps (GCHP), in order to meet the 2020 renewable energy target. This is the first detailed mechanistic study conducted in the UK with the aim to understand the interactions between the soil, horizontal heat exchangers and the aboveground environment.
Date: Aug 30, 2012 | Type: Paper | Attachment: Download File ›
Pillar: Natural Hazard & Risk
Hub: Tropical Cyclones
Authors: Ed Hawkins and Pier Luigi Vidale
Fields:
Summary: Tropical Atlantic storms impact the lives of many thousands of people each year. A study describes how different future anthropogenic emission pathways may change the frequency of these storms.
Date: Aug 21, 2012 | Type: Paper |
Journal: International Journal of Climatology | Ext. Link: Click Here ›
Pillar: Natural Hazard & Risk
Hub: Natural Disasters & Climate Adapation
Authors: Benjamin Lloyd-Hughes, Leonard C. Shaffrey, Pier Luigi Vidale, Nigel W. Arnell
Fields:
Summary: This paper compares the characteristics of synthetic European droughts generated by the HiGEM1 coupled climate model run with present day atmospheric composition with observed drought events extracted from the CRU TS3 data set.
Date: Aug 01, 2012 | Type: Paper |
Journal: Journal of Climate | Ext. Link: Click Here ›
Pillar: Natural Hazard & Risk
Hub: Tropical Cyclones
Authors: J. Strachan, P.L. Vidale, K.I. Hodges, MJ Roberts, and M.E. Demory,
Fields:
Summary: Tropical cyclones are among the most destructive environmental hazards, with intense, landfalling storms leading to significant socioeconomic impacts. Tropical cyclones account for four of the five most costly insurance losses from natural disasters over the period 1950 to 2009 (Munich Re, 2010), with U S. hurricanes responsible for the highest natural catastrophe insurance losses. It is therefore essential that risk assessment takes into account our best understanding of how the naturally and anthropogenically varying climate system modulates storm behaviour
Date: Aug 01, 2012 | Type: Paper | Attachment: Download File ›
Pillar: Natural Hazard & Risk
Hub: Flood
Authors: Liew, S.C., Liong, S.Y., and Raghavan, S.
Fields: Flood
Summary: The aims of the present study are twofold. First, the study proposes an approach in the development of IDF curves for places where short or no station data are available. Secondly, similar analyses for the future IDF curves are presented from a regional climate model (RCM) which downscales a general circulation model - ECHAM5 under the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change A2 emission scenario