Towards A Grid Infrastructure For Hydro-Meteorological Research

The Distributed Research Infrastructure for Hydro-Meteorological Study (DRIHMS) is a coordinatedaction co-funded by the European Commission. DRIHMS analyzes the main issuesthat arise when designing and setting up a pan-European Grid-based e-Infrastructure for researchactivities in the hydrologic and meteorological fields. The main outcome of the projectis represented first by a set of Grid usage patterns to support innovative hydro-meteorologicalresearch activities, and second by the implications that such patterns define for a dedicatedGrid infrastructure and the respective Grid architecture

Assessment of risk and accident impacts related to dangerous goods transport in a dense urbanized are

Proceedings Advanced technologies and methodologies for risk management in the global transport of dangerous goods, Genova, Italy, 24-26 october 2007International audienc

Application of an Earth-Observation-based building exposure mapping tool for flood damage assessment

Detection and characterization of territorial elements exposed to flood is a key component for flood risk analysis. Land-use description works well for small scales of representation but it becomes too coarse while increasing the scale. “Single-element” characterization is usually achieved through surveys, which become prohibitive as the amount of elements to be characterized increases. Mapping schemes represent a compromise between level of description and efforts for data collection. The basic idea is to determine the statistical distribution of building characteristics inside a homogeneous class starting from a sample area and to apply this distribution to the whole area, realizing a statistical extrapolation. An innovative approach was developed, merging the mapping scheme methodologies developed by the Global Earthquake Model [1] and Blanco–Vogt and Schanze [2], in which homogeneous classes are not development areas but building clusters. The approach was applied to the buildings in the Bisagno River floodplain, Genoa (Italy). Buildings were classified according to a building taxonomy. Once the percentage of basement presence was assigned to each class by surveying a limited subset of the exposed assets, a series of possible basement distributions was simulated to calculate the corresponding damage distributions for a real flood event. The total average damage obtained is very close to the refund claims, with a percentage error lower than 2%

Analyse de la vulnérabilité d'un système territorial complexe aux aléas naturels

International audienc

Dynamic resource allocation for forest fire risk management

The occurrence of one or more simultaneous forest fires requires that decision makers are able to solve a complex problem of resources allocation to fight the fires. The efficiency of the emergency management system can be deeply affected by these decisions, which, in turn, are influenced by the predicted behavior of forest fires. In this paper, a methodology is introduced, based on system modeling and optimization, to manage resource allocation, for real time control of forest fires, over a regional area. While several studies have proposed different models of forest fire dynamics, a proper formalization related to the decision support aspect has not been so deeply investigated. In this work, a graph model and a mathematical formalization are introduced in order to describe the territory under consideration, and the dynamics of the detected fires. A specific case study in Liguria region (Italy) is presented, in order to highlight the feasibility of the proposed approach

Impact of modelling scale on probabilistic flood risk assessment: The Malawi case

none5openRudari R; Beckers J; De Angeli S; Rossi L; Trasforini ERudari, R; Beckers, J; De Angeli, S; Rossi, L; Trasforini,

Impact of modelling scale on probabilistic flood risk assessment: the Malawi case

In the early months of 2015, destructive floods hit Malawi, causing deaths and economic losses. Flood risk assessment outcomes can be used to increase scientific-supported awareness of risk. The recent increase in availability of high resolution data such as TanDEM-X at 12m resolution makes possible the use of detailed physical based flood hazard models in risk assessment. Nonetheless the scale of hazard modelling still remains an issue, which requires a compromise between level of detail and computational efforts. This work presents two different approaches on hazard modelling. Both methods rely on 32-years of numeric weather re-analysis and rainfall-runoff transformation through a fully distributed WFLOW-type hydrological model. The first method, applied at national scale, uses fast post-processing routines, which estimate flood water depth at a resolution of about 1×1km. The second method applies a full 2D hydraulic model to propagate water discharge into the flood plains and best suites for small areas where assets are concentrated. At the 12m resolution, three hot spots with a model area of approximately 10×10 km are analysed. Flood hazard maps obtained with both approaches are combined with flood impact models at the same resolution to generate indicators for flood risk. A quantitative comparison of the two approaches is presented in order to show the effects of modelling scale on both hazard and impact losses