Integrating responsiveness in the identification and characterization of compound heavy rainfall and wave storms events

From a risk management perspective, the relevance of compound events lies in the fact that they can significantly increase the intensity and/or the spatial and temporal extension of the impact (and damage) due to the synergic and/or cumulative action of different hazards. This compounding effect may overwhelm the capability of emergency-response services since these have to tackle an “unusual” high-damaging situation, they have to respond to a large number of emergency situations throughout the region at the same time, and/or they have to maintain the level of response during a relatively long period. Due to this, from this perspective, it would be important to incorporate the emergency/recovery services responsiveness to identify these events, as well as to evaluate their probability of occurrence. In this work we investigate this by parameterising this response as a time window between individual extreme events (rainfall and waves) to define the presence of a compound event. This time window depends on the intrinsic capacity of response of the available services, but also on the magnitude of contributing events as well as their spatial scale. In this work we analyse the variation of the probability of occurrence of compound heavy rainfall and wave storms events along the Catalan coast (NW Mediterranean) as a function of the responsiveness.

This work was supported by the Spanish Agency of Research in the framework of the C3RiskMed (PID2020-113638RB-C21/ AEI /  10.13039/501100011033)