Hazard Impact Assessment: HazImp

Brief description

The HazImp system enables users to analyse the impact of natural hazards. HazImp is capable of assessing the impact of a range of hazards including, but not limited to, floods and tropical cyclones. HazImp uses a set of pre-processed inputs, perform logic based analysis using predefined models and produce a range of quantitative outputs. These inputs may be produced by existing external systems including hazard modelling applications. HazImp outputs may include aggregated values, statistical figures, diagrams and spatial maps to describe the impact of the natural hazard to the study area.

HazImp assesses the impact of a natural hazard as a combination of three fundamental elements:
• Hazard - the type of hazard and its properties;
• Exposure - elements that are or could be subject to the hazard;
• Vulnerability – an element’s physical or social susceptibility to the hazard.

All three elements are required to properly assess the impact of a hazard and a change in any element will affect the impact results. HazImp supports a set of inputs, each corresponding to one of these three elements. HazImp is designed to support a wide variety of scenarios making it highly customisable to the event or events being analysed. In particular, HazImp is compatible with existing GA systems.

HazImp supports two primary business cases for natural hazard impact assessment. The first, to support risk assessment and mitigation where system response times can be generous and could be as long as weeks. The second, is forecasting the impact of an imminent event, where an assessment is needed in real-time.

Lineage

Maintenance and Update Frequency: continual

Statement: HazImp has initially been developed at Geoscience Australia. HazImp is available at https://github.com/GeoscienceAustralia/hazimp