METEOR: A methodology for assessing the potential for multi-hazard impacts on building exposure in developing nations.

The METEOR project (Modelling Exposure Through Earth Observation Routines) is a three year project ending in March 2021, co-funded by the UK Space Agency International Partnership Programme. The aim of this project was to develop innovative methods to understand multi-hazard and exposure, and to deliver robust data for Disaster Risk Management (DRM) in Nepal and Tanzania.

In developing economies there is a pressing need to characterise hazard, exposure and vulnerability to allow for comprehensive DRM plans and pre-positioning. In the METEOR project these exposure protocols and standards were co-developed and validated in Nepal and Tanzania to ensure that they are fit-for-purpose.  Many multi-hazard mapping approaches focus on the frequency of events and use historical financial losses as a proxy for infrastructure impact or exposure (Bell and Glade, 2004; Tate et al., 2010; Schmidt et al., 2011; Kappes et al., 2012). Whilst such approaches may be appropriate for hazards with historic inventories detailing the distribution and scale of events, for others estimation of key factors such as historic frequency, or probability of occurrence or losses, is much more complex.

Here we will present a new methodology for assessing the national impact of multi-hazards on exposure, grounded in earth observation data, in the context of data paucity and high levels of inherent uncertainty. We explore a subset of the METEOR data for Nepal to discuss the main controls on the uncertainty of the final outputs of our model.  We also show how our model can be tied to existing vulnerability curves to link hazard assessments with expected damage.