Title: Assessing and forecasting uncertain hazards

Abstract:

Geophysical natural hazards — storm surge, post-fire debris flows, volcanic flows and ash fall, etc. — impact thousands to millions of people annually. Yet the most devastating hazards, those resulting in loss of life and property, are often both geographically and temporally localized. Thus they are effectively rare events to those impacted.

We will present methodology to produce probabilistic hazard maps that can rapidly be updated to account for various aleatoric scenarios and epistemic uncertainties. This hazard analysis utilizes statistical emulators to combine computationally expensive simulations of the underlying geophysical processes with probabilistic descriptions of uncertain scenarios and model parameters. The end goal is not a map, but a family of maps that represent how a hazard threat evolves under different assumptions or different potential future scenarios. Further, this approach allows us to rapidly update hazard maps as new data or precursor information arrives.