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UNSAFE: An UNcertain Structure And Fragility Ensemble framework for property-level flood risk estimation

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Abstract

Flooding is a frequent, widespread, and damaging natural hazard in the United States. Property-level economic flood risk estimates are increasingly used in research and practice to help inform management practices and policies. Due to measurement and modeling error of hazard, exposure, and vulnerability at the scale of individual assets, it is crucial that property-level flood risk estimates account for uncertainty in key inputs. However, this is uncommon in research and practice. We fill this gap with The Uncertain Structure and Fragility Ensemble (UNSAFE) framework, a free and open-source tool for representing uncertainty in property-level flood-risk estimation in the U.S. UNSAFE is designed to work with outputs from any flood inundation model. Initial tests show that the current operational risk assessment framework, which neglects uncertainty in drivers of flood damage, underestimates flood damage estimates that are produced by UNSAFE. UNSAFE is and will be used in several Integrated Coastal Modeling (ICoM) funded studies that explore fundamental science questions related to the co-evolution of coastal flood hazards, exposure, and risk. UNSAFE is a flexible framework that can support many multisector dynamics research projects and its developers are eager to improve its functionality for the broader MSD community of practice.

Category
Model Uncertainties, Model Biases, and Fit-for-Purpose
Extremes Events
Coastal
Funding Program Area(s)