Hazard Risk
Hazard identification and risk assessment provides the factual basis for activities proposed in the strategy portion of a hazard mitigation plan. An effective risk assessment informs proposed actions by focusing attention and resources on the greatest risks.
The four basic components of a risk assessment are:
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hazard identification,
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profiling of hazard events,
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inventory of assets, and
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estimation of potential human and economic losses based on the exposure and vulnerability of people, buildings, and infrastructure.
Soil erosion
Mapping erosion risk is increasingly needed by environment agencies. The Revised Universal Soil Loss Equation (USLE) is a widely used mathematical model that describes soil erosion processes with a Geographic Information System (GIS) to quantify erosion risk. Soil data, land use inventory, digital elevation data, and climatic atlases is used as resource data sets to generate RUSLE factor values.
Data sets for the RUSLE factors, along with associated maps showing geographic distributions, are established on IDRISI geographic information system (GIS). IDRISI is used to interactively calculate soil loss and map erosion risk.
Landfill site selection
During the last decades one of the most critical and most difficult environmental problems the societies are facing, relates to the implementation of integrated solid waste management programs (SWM).
The potential problems, resulting from inadequate application or inapplicability of rational SWM programs, are identified both at the stage of the original waste collection and transport as well as at the stage of the choice of the disposal method.
The Landfill as an option for final disposal, is considered imperative, regardless of the method or the system of waste management that can be selected. Therefore the criteria established for the siting of a landfill are many, multidisciplinary and sometimes conflicting. To this end, the site selected regions depend largely on the choice of criteria, the chosen locating method, as well as their potential limitations.
Flood risk
Flash floods are considered to be one of the worst weather-related natural disasters. They are dangerous because they are sudden and are highly unpredictable following brief spells of heavy rain. Several qualitative methods exist in the literature for the estimations of the risk level of flash flood hazard within a watershed. Evmolpos uses remote sensing data such as enhanced Thematic Mapper Plus (ETM+), Shuttle Radar Topography Mission (SRTM), coupled with geological, geomorphological, and field data in a GIS environment for the estimation of the flash flood risk.
