Quantitative methods for estimating flood fatalities: towards the introduction of loss-of-life estimation in the assessment of flood risk

Risk, including flood risk, can be defined as ??the combination of the probability of an event and its consequences??. Assessing and managing the risk from flooding should explicitly include the estimation of impacts to people. Extensive research is currently ongoing looking at both quantitative and qualitative approaches for assessing flood impacts on people. Although there is some literature available on such approaches, examples of methodological and routinely applications of these methodologies as part of flood risk assessments are rare. This paper focuses on quantitative approaches for estimating impacts of flooding to people, notably on methods for assessing fatality numbers associated with flooding. Three methods for assessing losses of life are discussed in detail. The methods discussed here constitute the forefront of research in Canada, UK and The Netherlands. These methods provide an assessment of the physical consequences of flooding on people and can be used to introduce the impacts to people as quantitative metric for the assessment of flood risk. In this paper, the three methodologies are discussed and applied in a UK case study reproducing the 1953 East Coast flood event. This study aims to provide a comprehensive comparison on both the reliability and the applicability of the methods. We analyse possible added values on using of these methods in systematic analyses, aiming to provide guidelines for applying these methods for flood fatality risk assessment.     

Nation building and resource management: The politics of ‘nature’ in Timor Leste

This paper examines the role of custom and tradition in the process of nation building and resource management in post-independence Timor Leste (East Timor). While customary land tenure is alluded to but not explicitly recognized under the Timorese Constitution, it is clearly stated that all natural resources are owned by the State. However, this paper argues that rather than waiting for the government to create land and resource management related laws, local people in Timor Leste are making and remaking their own laws, mobilizing their customary practices and, increasingly, ‘performing’ their traditions in public demonstrations of their extant capacities. In part, this process can be read as a way of enticing in outsiders, making them a party to the law making process, a witness to its legitimacy. Often critical to such processes, is the ability of local level leaders to draw in outsiders through their engagements with the idea of ‘nature’ – a concept which allows diverse interests to come together in conversation and build relationships despite what is often a dissonance in the meanings and priorities attributed to the concept (see Tsing, A.L., 2005. Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection. Princeton University Press, Princeton and Oxford). The paper focuses on a view from the margins – Tutuala in the far east of the country – and ways in which this community is attempting to both resist and embrace the developmental hegemony of a centrist state. This, it is argued, is a case which demonstrates the power of the local (both ritually and politically) to shape and intervene in the national development process and the associated discourses of nature preservation.     

An analysis of geomagnetic field variations (3 min-2 h) at a low-latitude observatory (L=1.6)

An analysis of the geomagnetic field variations between 3 min and 2 h at L’Aquila (L=1.6) shows that the power level in the low-frequency range (i.e. for periods longer than approximately 10 min) at solar maximum (1989/90) is much higher than at solar minimum (1985/86). Conversely, at solar minimum, it emerges that there is a greater relative importance of fluctuations with periods smaller than 10 min which might be related to the greater percentage of solar wind speeds greater than approximately 540 km s⁻¹. Diurnal, seasonal and solar cycle variations of both the high- and the low-frequency power are also discussed. We found that several aspects of these variations might be correlated with ionospheric features such as the ionisation of the F2 layer and the location and the intensity of the S current system.     

Automatic digital recording of geomagnetic elements by means of a proton precession magnetometer

A simple system of automatic recording of geomagnetic field components by means of a proton vector magnetometer has been built and tested at L'Aquila Geomagnetic Observatory. The instrument is working with the use of a combination of the addition and compensation methods to directly measure absolute values of field components. A sophisticated equipment for the current generation and control is necessary to maintain the current flowing in the Helmholtz coils within 2 A for successive measurements. To maximize the signal coming from the sensor inside the coils for the different components, a simple arrangement of two orthogonal small coils in only one sensor has been made.After two years of experience and improvements the system has been further controlled comparing it with Ruska variometers regularly working in L'Aquila Observatory.Some practical problems found in operating the system are discussed. The automatic hourly mean computation is suggested to produce yearbooks.     

‘Isolated base-of-slope aprons’: An oxymoron for shallow-marine fan-shaped,temperate-water,carbonate bodies along the south-east Salento escarpment (Pleistocene,Apulia, southern Italy)

This paper regards the lower Pleistocene temperate-water carbonate deposits disconformably overlying an escarpment made up of faulted Cretaceous to Miocene limestones of the Apulia Foreland (southern Italy). Study deposits discontinuously crop out along the present-day eastern Salento sea cliff, and form isolated fan-shaped bodies, up to 1 km wide and up to 40 to 50 m thick, each of them covering an area of a few square kilometres. The internal arrangement of beds is represented by up to 25° to 30° lobate, seaward dipping clinobeds thinning and onlapping onto a rocky foreslope in the proximal sector and passing to gently inclined to sub-horizontal strata in the distal sector. Seven facies were distinguished, mainly composed of coarse-grained skeletal carbonates made up of a heterozoan association including coralline algae, large and small benthic foraminifera, echinoids, molluscs, bryozoans and serpulids. Since clinobeds were formed thanks to hyperconcentrated density flows (grain flows) bypassing the upper part of the inherited escarpment, these skeletal grains represent ex situ deposits whose shallow-marine factory was located upward (landward) with respect to the bypassed zone, likely in the almost flat area on top of the Salento Peninsula. Clinobeds are often affected by tens of metres wide and long channel-like structures interpreted as landslide scars. Inside these gullies, contorted beds (slumps) or matrix-supported intra-bioclastic floatstone/rudstone (massive deposits) are present. The occurrence of supercritical-flow structures (for example, backset-bedded beds) indicates the development of hydraulic jumps along the steep slope of gullies. Since these clinostratified, fan-shaped carbonate bodies represent carbonate slopes, and that the latter are known as aprons, normally related to linear sourced sediments, an acceptable oxymoron for studied fan-shaped carbonate bodies is suggested: ‘isolated base-of-slope aprons’.     

The Earth’s passage of the April 11, 1997 coronal ejecta: geomagnetic field fluctuations at high and low latitude during northward interplanetary magnetic field conditions

An analysis of the low frequency geomagnetic field fluctuations at an Antarctic (Terra Nova Bay) and a low latitude (L’Aquila, Italy) station during the Earth’s passage of a coronal ejecta on April 11, 1997 shows that major solar wind pressure variations were followed at both stations by a high fluctuation level. During northward interplanetary magnetic field conditions and when Terra Nova Bay is close to the local geomagnetic noon, coherent fluctuations, at the same frequency (3.6 mHz) and with polarization characteristics indicating an antisunward propagation, were observed simultaneously at the two stations. An analysis of simultaneous measurements from geosynchronous satellites shows evidence for pulsations at approximately the same frequencies also in the magnetospheric field. The observed waves might then be interpreted as oscillation modes, triggered by an external stimulation, extending to a major portion of the Earth’s magnetosphere.     

The ecology and biogeography of tintinnid ciliates in the Atlantic sector of the Southern Ocean

Qualitative and quantitative analyses of the tintinnids retrieved in surface and vertical (down to 1150 m ) samples in the Scotia, Weddell, Bransfield and Bellingshausen areas allow us to define three distinct zones: (A) the Scotia Sea, Bransfield Strait and oceanic waters of the northern-central Weddell Sea, dominated by Codonelopsis gaussi and Cymatocylis affinis/conmllaria; (B) shelf and mostly ice-covered areas of the southernmost Weddell Sea and the Bellingshausen Sea, characterized by Laackmanniella prolongata and Cymatocylis drygalskii; (C) Bransfield-Weddell waters around the tip of the Antarctic Peninsula, where Codonellopsis balechi accounts for 80% of the tintinnids. These areas have (often significantly) different ice regimes, water-column depths, surface salinities, bulk planktonic settling volumes and microplanktonic concentrations. On the other hand, the composition of tintinnid assemblages is very similar on both sides of the Antarctic Peninsula. Causal interpretations for these heterogeneous distribution patterns and probable specific adaptations to the dissimilar environmental settings involved are analyzed.