PRE4IMPACT-AT

Impacts of Landslides, Flash Floods & Hail in Austria: National Data & Explainable AI for Early Warning & Trend Analysis

The primary goal of PRE4IMPACT-AT is to develop explainable models for the spatio-temporal prediction of natural hazard impacts at a national scale. The project specifically focuses on impacts caused by precipitation-related landslides, flash floods and hail, while also adopting a multi-hazard perspective.

Landslide and flash flood impacts are driven by a complex interplay of meteorological, biophysical (incl. geomorphology) and socioeconomic factors, which will be considered. Hail impacts are usually simpler to grasp conceptually, as the weatherphenomenon directly affects vulnerable assets like agricultural fields. Based on discussions with data providers and end-user needs, we will initially focus on the impacts of shallow earh and debris slide-type movements (incl. open-hillslope flows) and flash floods on infrastructure, such as buildings and transportation networks. In contrast, hail impact assessment will concentrate on agriculture. We will initially address these impacts individually due to their distinct drivers and modelling requirements, before being integrated into a multi-hazard framework.

It should be noted that a common methodological framework will be applied across all processes to ensure the approaches are transferable to other precipitation-related impacts.