Natural hazards such as cyclones, floods, drought, heat waves, and so on can be linked (i.e. interact, influence, drive or merge with each other) to create a chain of episodes that go beyond what governments, emergency managers, urban planners and even citizens have planned for. Climate change, apart from potentially increasing hazards’ frequency and magnitude, introduces complexities that may increase incidents of compound hazards, secondary hazards, cascades, and alter their inter-dependencies. In addition, non-stationarities in physical processes and in land use and more general in systems’ features require updated methods, techniques and statistical approaches to assess the risk due to the linking of weather-driven hazards. Taking a long-term perspective, adaptive strategies are needed to reduce the vulnerability of exposed elements (e.g. cities, crops, industries and critical infrastructures) with respect to these non-stationarities, usually manifesting in different spatiotemporal scales, and their complex influence on weather-driven hazards.
Here we solicit contributions that:
1) Highlight the physical processes and related non-stationarities characterizing weather-driven hazards’ interactions, e.g., climatic drivers responsible for joint storm-flood episodes accounting for any time-lags between the event types, or, compound drivers with secondary hazards.
2) Describe new methodologies, techniques and statistical approaches (e.g., use of economic loss data to identify dependences, advances in deterministic and stochastic forecasting, clustering identification, etc.) that are useful to quantify the spatiotemporal characteristics of linked weather-driven hazards.
3) Focus on socio-economic impacts (regional and/or global), caused by linked weather-driven hazards, in the past (i.e. case studies) and in the future under diverse climatic scenarios.
4) Give new insights into how vulnerability may be reduced in a long-term perspective with respect to combined weather-driven hazards.
Abstracts can be submitted here.
Water & Climate 