Analysis of Multi-Hazard Events in Tropical Regions

Funding agency:

German Federal Ministry for Education and Research (BMBF)

Funding period:

March 2022 - November 2025

Project description:

In topical and mountainous regions, intense and convective rainstorms often trigger a set of coupled or cascading hazards in the basin scale that includes landslides, hillslope debris flows, flash floods, and channelized debris flows. The final stage of such events is marked on fans or low-land areas that are often populated, causing disasters.

The hazard assessment of such phenomena is a challenge. Several approaches have been developed to model their sub-processes independently, like hydrology, flooding, slope stability, and debris flow runout models. Even though individual models can reach high precision, their interaction with other processes in space and time is neglected, therefore cannot provide reliable results in a multi-hazard setting

The primary motivation of this project is to combine different modelling approaches for multi-hazard modelling, including physical and statistical models, and Artificial Intelligence algorithms. The final goal is to quantify how different modelling methods can complement each other in different study areas, increasing their applicability in tropical environments, where the understanding of multi-hazards is limited. This analysis would open the door to new applications and synergies between traditional modelling and data-driven methods within natural hazards.