Register to Attend Our Seminar Series 2024
Date: Wednesday 23rd October
Time:
2:00pm Guest arrival
2:30pm Presentation commences
4:30pm One hour drinks & canapes served in First Fleet Bar & Foyer
Venue: Museum of Sydney, Cnr Bridge St &, Phillip St, Sydney
Speakers:
- Paul Somerville, Chief Geoscientist at Risk Frontiers
- Dr. Scott Menegon, Senior Lecturer Civil and Construction Engineering at Swinburne University
- Dr. Hamish Clarke, Senior Research Fellow, Future Fire Risk School of Agriculture, Food and Ecosystem Sciences at University of Melbourne
- Leanne Haupt, Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and
Water
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PAST EVENTS
Risk Frontiers Seminar Series 2023
Held at Museum of Sydney on Tuesday 24th October 2023
Gallery
Dr. Andréa S. Taschetto & Dr. Ryan Crompton
Dr. Maxime Marin
Dr. Sanaa Hobeichi
Dr. Behnam Beheshtian
Question time
Learn More About Our Speakers and Presentations
Evolution of National Seismic Hazard Models for Australia over Three Decades
Paul is Risk Frontiers’ lead scientist for earthquake and tsunami loss models in Australia, New Zealand, and Japan. He holds a PhD in Geophysics.
Paul is also Principal Seismologist at AECOM, focusing on earthquake source and ground motion models for seismic hazard analyses used in designing major infrastructure worldwide. He is a past President of the Australian Earthquake Engineering Society and has contributed to the National Seismic Hazard Assessment 2018 and ANCOLD 2019 seismic guidelines.
Seismic Resilience of the Australian Building Stock Following Three Decades of Code Improvements
Scott is a Senior Lecturer at Swinburne University of Technology in the Department of Civil and Construction Engineering. Scott is the President of the Australian Earthquake Engineering Society (AEES) and is a Chartered Professional Engineer (structural) with experience designing buildings in the health, government, education, transport and residential sectors. Scott is a member of BD-006-11 and BD-002-08, which are the Standards Australia sub-committees responsible for AS 1170.4 and the seismic provisions of AS 3600, respectively. His contributions to seismic design in Australia have been recognised through being awarded the 2019 and 2022 RW Chapman Medal from Engineers Australia.
A high-level tour of wildfire concepts, then a dive into the State of Wildfires report and what it can (or can’t) say about fire here in Australia.
Hamish Clarke researches bushfire risk, fire management and climate change at the University of Melbourne. He is currently a Westpac Research Fellow and was recently awarded an ARC Mid-Career Industry Fellowship to support climate-adapted bushfire risk management. His accolades include the 2024 Frederick White Medal, a 2021 Young Tall Poppy and the 2021 Eureka Prize for Applied Environmental Research as part of the NSW Bushfire Hub. Hamish was previously based at the University of Wollongong, Western Sydney University and the NSW Environment Department. He is committed to public interest science and effective engagement with fire managers, policy makers and the community. Hamish writes at the Future Fire substack and is inaugural chair of Natural Hazards Research Australia’s new Early and Mid-Career Academics and Practitioners Network. He lives in Melbourne with his wife and three daughters.
Leanne Haupt, Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water
Updates to the climate change considerations chapter of Australian Rainfall and Runoff including potential implications to the insurance industry.
Leanne is a Director at the Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water (DCCEEW). She has been working with flood modellers, climate scientists and industry stakeholders to update to the Interim Climate Change considerations, Chapter 6 of book 1 of the Australian Rainfall and Runoff: A Guide to Flood Estimation (Geoscience Australia, 2019).
Led by the Department of Climate Change Energy, the Environment and Water (DCCEEW) in partnership with Engineers Australia, the update of the Guidance was undertaken in collaboration with users and is based on the latest climate change science. We are now consulting with practitioners and end users on application of the guidance and its implications.
Implementation of a machine learning based storm surge model within Risk Frontiers’ tropical cyclone CAT-loss model.
Maxime is a risk scientist at Risk Frontiers and helps develop and manage Risk Frontiers’ suite of models. He holds a PhD in quantitative Marine Science from the University of Tasmania. His research investigated the drivers and impacts of marine heatwaves.
Maxime’s role within Risk Frontiers focuses on Risk Frontiers’ Cyclone model CyclAUS and implementing a new machine learning based storm surge hazard component. He also uses his strong background in extreme and climate science to improve the development of other models including Flood, Hail and assist the ClimateGLOBE project.
In the context of global sea level rise, coastal flooding losses due to storm surge events are a growing threat for Australians. Such events are commonly observed during tropical cyclones (TCs). Although Australia is baring down a hot and dry El Nino summer, Australian coastlines are still at risk. The loss associated with storm surge during a TC is often ignored in traditional TC Catastrophe-Loss models due to the complexity of modelling extreme sea level events in Monte-Carlo simulation infrastructures. Here, we present a machine learning modelling approach to include storm surge risk within Risk Frontiers’ TC loss model – CyclAUS. Storm surge water levels are modelled using Convolutional Neural Networks trained on a coastal sea level reanalysis dataset, spanning the Australian coastline at a 25 km resolution. Outputs from CyclAUS, simulating 50000 years of current climatology TCs around Australia, are then fed to point-based individual storm surge models to extract a maximum sea level height. Storm surge model validation shows that our machine learning approach has comparable skills to hydrodynamic solutions, while demanding far fewer computational resources, thus enabling its implementation into stochastic CAT-loss models.
Dr. Behnam Beheshtian, Risk Engineer at Risk Frontiers
Vulnerability Assessment of Highly Populated Buildings in the Face of Earthquake and Tsunami Hazards
Behnam is a Risk Engineer at Risk Frontiers, responsible for developing and maintaining the QuakeAUS and QuakeNZ models, in addition to contributing to the development of other models within the group. He is passionate about researching the risk and resilience of the built environment in the face of natural hazards, including earthquakes, tsunamis, and bushfires. Holding a bachelor’s in civil engineering, along with his industry experience, means he is well-versed in the structural design of a wide variety of commercial, industrial, and infrastructure projects. Behnam’s PhD is in Earthquake Engineering from Swinburne University of Technology, where he researched the risk and resilience of the built environment to tsunami and seismic hazards.
In this presentation, I will talk about my recent study that focused on the vulnerability of highly
populated buildings, using the AsiaWorld-Expo mega-structure in Hong Kong as a case study. This research used OpenSees software to develop a 3D numerical model of the building. Incremental dynamic analysis was conducted to analyse the seismic vulnerability of the structure, and a physics-based methodology was applied to determine the structure’s tsunami response under various scenarios. The primary outcomes of the research included structural fragility curves, reflecting the building’s damage potential in the face of seismic and tsunami hazards. I found that the structure is more vulnerable along its shorter dimension (parallel to the roof trusses, the Y direction) due to fewer shear walls. Moreover, for assessing tsunami-induced damage, instead of flow depth, the use of the kinematic moment of momentum flux was the preferred intensity measure. The findings provide crucial insights for risk-informed design strategies in earthquake- and tsunami-prone areas.
The 2022/2023 Normalisation of the ICA Disaster List
Jacob is a Senior Risk Scientist at Risk Frontiers. He has worked across several of Risk Frontiers catastrophe loss models and contributed to numerous research projects. Jacob joined Risk Frontiers in 2017 and has been involved in updating Risk Frontiers CyclAUS, FloodAUS, QuakeAUS and QuakeNZ models. He has used statistical analysis and applied machine learning algorithms to achieve a more accurate representation of the hazard and vulnerability components of our models. Jacob has a background in physics and mathematics and holds a PhD in Condensed Matter Physics from Macquarie University
This presentation will discuss the 2022/2023 normalisation of the ICA Disaster List. Since 2005, Risk Frontiers has normalised the losses from the ICA Disaster List to estimate the insured loss that would be sustained if these events were to recur under the current year’s societal conditions, with this year being the 5th iteration of the normalisation. The methodology applied to the Disaster List is based on dwellings and adjusts for changes in the number, value and size of dwellings as well as building standards in the case of tropical cyclones. Of interest are two significant natural disasters that have occurred since the last normalisation of the Disaster List – the 2019/20 Black Summer bushfires and the 2022 South East Queensland and New South Wales floods.
