Equivalent hazard magnitude scale

Abstract

Abstract. Hazard magnitude scales are widely adopted to facilitate communication regarding hazard events and the corresponding decision making for emergency management. A hazard magnitude scale measures the strength of a hazard event considering the natural forcing phenomena and the severity of the event with respect to average entities at risk. However, existing hazard magnitude scales cannot be easily adapted for comparative analysis across different hazard types. Here, we propose an equivalent hazard magnitude scale to measure the hazard strength of an event across multiple types of hazards. We name the scale the Gardoni Scale after Professor Paolo Gardoni. We design the equivalent hazard magnitude on the Gardoni Scale as a linear transformation of the expectation of a measure of adverse impact of a hazard event given average exposed value and vulnerability. With records of 12 hazard types from 1900 to 2020, we demonstrate that the equivalent magnitude can be empirically derived with historical data on hazard magnitude indicators and records of event impacts. In this study, we model the impact metric as a function of fatalities, total affected population, and total economic damage. We show that hazard magnitudes of events can be evaluated and compared across hazard types. We find that tsunami and drought events tend to have large hazard magnitudes, while tornadoes are relatively small in terms of hazard magnitude. In addition, we demonstrate that the scale can be used to determine hazard equivalency of individual historical events. For example, we compute that the hazard magnitude of the February 2021 North American cold wave event affecting the southern states of the United States of America was equivalent to the hazard magnitude of Hurricane Harvey in 2017 or a magnitude 7.5 earthquake. Future work will expand the current study in hazard equivalency to modelling of local intensities of hazard events and hazard conditions within a multi-hazard context.