Emergency responders often have to operate and respond to emergency situations during dynamic weather conditions, including floods. This paper demonstrates a novel method using existing tools and datasets to evaluate emergency responder accessibility during flood events within the city of Leicester, UK.

Original Source

Climate change is affecting every aspect of human activities, especially the agriculture. In China, extreme drought events caused by climate change have posed a great threat to food safety. In this work we aimed to study the drought risk of maize in the farming–pastoral ecotone in Northern China based on physical vulnerability assessment. The physical vulnerability curve was constructed from the relationship between drought hazard intensity index and yield loss rate.

Category 5 Super Typhoon Bopha, the world's worst storm of 2012, formed abnormally close to the Equator, and its landfall on Mindanao set the record proximity to the Equator for its category. Its torrential rains generated an enormous debris flow in the Mayo River watershed that swept away much of the village Andap in the New Bataan municipality, burying areas under rubble as thick as 9 m and killing 566 people. Established in 1968, New Bataan had never experienced super typhoons and debris flows. This unfamiliarity compounded the death and damage.

Debris flows often cause devastating damage to property and can injure or kill residents in mountainous areas. The construction of check dams in debris-flow valleys is considered a useful strategy for mitigating the damages downstream. In this paper, a new type of spillway structure with lateral contraction was proposed to distribute debris flows after the check dam storage filled up.

This paper presents a very high resolution atlas of daily precipitations across the Balearic Islands territory. The generation of this dataset allows not only to set the grounds for future updates ingesting a myriad of observation sources but also aims at providing support to local and network-topology independent studies of precipitation-senstive systems such as ecosystems, water resources and energy systems. As an example, a better understanding of the negative precipitation trends is found.

Experience has shown that river floods can significantly hamper the reliability of railway networks and cause extensive structural damage and disruption. As a result, the national railway operator in Austria had to cope with financial losses of more than EUR 100 million due to flooding in recent years. Comprehensive information on potential flood risk hot spots as well as on expected flood damage in Austria is therefore needed for strategic flood risk management.

Aside of immediate impacts, the 2011 Puyehue–Cordón Caulle volcano (PCC) eruption also caused persisting chemical impacts. By 2012, toxicity resulted in overt dental fluorosis in deer, with bone fluoride increasing > 38-fold to 5175 ppm. Sheep, horses and cattle also succumbed to fluorosis. Due to eolian redeposition of tephra, exposure of ruminants continued, bone fluoride reached 10 396 ppm, and by 2014 skeletal fluorosis was found.

Original Source

August 2014 saw a major landslide strike in a densely populated district 80 km northeast of Kathmandu, in Sindhupalchok district. This study combines evidence from surveys and interviews to assess impacts and preventive and coping measures taken. The impacts relative to annual income show that lower-income households lost up to 14 times their annual income, as opposed to 3 times for the wealthier. The implications of these findings for discussions surrounding loss and damage are discussed.

Landslide is one of the most ravaging natural disaster in the world and recent occurrences in Nigeria require urgent need for landslide risk assessment. A total of nine samples representing three major landslide prone areas in Nigeria were studied, with a view of determining their liquefaction and sliding potential. Geotechnical analysis was used to investigate the liquefaction potential, while the slope conditions were deduced using SLOPE/W. The results of geotechnical analysis revealed that the soils contain 6–34 % clay and 72–90 % sand.

The development of methods for rapid flood mapping and risk assessment is a key step to increase the usefulness of flood early warning systems, and is crucial for effective emergency response and flood impact mitigation. Currently, flood early warning systems rarely include real–time components to assess potential impacts generated by forecasted flood events. To overcome this limitation, this work describes the benchmarking of an operational procedure for rapid flood risk assessment based on predictions issued by the European Flood Awareness System (EFAS).