21 November 2017 Flood mapping for large areas (e.g. from catchments to a national level) is relatively new and challenging; associating mapped flood-prone areas with an annual chance of occurrence (in probabilities, say 1%) of a flood event involves many kinds of uncertainties and is even harder. Flood maps that suggest various hazard levels over [...]
25 October 2017 It's well known that hundreds of thousands of Australian properties (e.g. residential, commercial and industrial) at the urban-bushland interface are very prone to damaging bushfires. Increasing population, urban encroachment into bushland and a dangerous warming climate all suggest that bushfire risk is on the increase. Bushfire risk assessment has been a [...]
16 October 2017 The catastrophic wildfires in Northern California started a week ago have claimed at least 40 lives and destroyed nearly 6,000 buildings (news report). The fires continuously burning over the past week and the extensive damage have been observed by low-, medium- and high-resolution satellite imagery. Here we summarise and analyse a few useful imagery sources. [...]
Location information is critical for news reporting, especially in the event of emergencies, natural disasters, industrial pollution, etc. Relevant location information and insights can not only make the news story more detailed and interesting, but also help readers understand each event and its context more quickly. BigData Earth has been developing unique location [...]
10 August 2017 In the previous post, we presented the increase of Australian population and residential dwellings from 2006 to 2016, and how they vary across States and Territories. In this post, we report how much and how fast exposure has changed in coastal regions during the same period. (Australia is sometimes seen as the world’s largest [...]
10 August 2017 The Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) has recently released the first batch of 2016 Census data, and its DataPacks can be obtained here. The new time series profiles on community characteristics provide a unique perspective on how Australian exposure has been changing over the past decade. In this post, we report population [...]
26 June 2017 Location information and insights are becoming ubiquitous and more important than ever. Tangible and easy-to-read location information, mainly through maps and various visualisation techniques, enhances our understanding of many dynamic phenomena. For the current news reporting on major hazardous events taking place around the world, there is a need to include more detailed and coherent [...]
3 April 2017 Last Friday we developed two animations that show estimated flood extents of the major floods in Lismore and Murwillumbah, northern NSW. Today we extend that work and apply the same technique to effectively map and visualise many low-lying, flood-prone areas in Queensland. We choose the following two areas for demonstration: Rockhampton [...]
Initial release: 31 March 2017 The south-east QLD and northern NSW are often afflicted with widespread flooding caused by the torrential rain typically associated with ex-cyclones, and this time with the remnants of severe Tropical Cyclone Debbie which made landfall on the QLD coast between Bowen and Mackay on 28 March 2017. Based on [...]
27 March 2017 It is forecast that Tropical Cyclone Debbie will cause severe damage to the coastal region spanning from Townsville in the north to Mackay in the south. It will make landfall near Bowen. Figure 1: Latest track forecast for TC Debbie (Source: BoM) We use a newly-developed national platform to [...]