11 February 2019 We have been active in reporting and sharing information about the major flooding in Queensland (link to Twitter posts and mass media mentions, e.g. CNN and The Guardian). This brief blog is specific to the flooding in West and North-West Queensland. First, the big picture. We use NASA’s Terra/MODIS imagery (2019-01-02 vs. [...]
28 January 2019 Over the past few years we have been building cloud-based big data and analytics platforms and foundational Location Profile APIs for property location and hazard risk information. These advances have enabled us to speed up the pace of new product development. Now we are pleased to release a new web [...]
12 December 2018 This is our 2018 end-of-year review article. Catastrophe loss modelling, as a special type of environmental modelling, has been around for three decades. It captures all essential components of the classic risk equation, i.e. Risk = f (Hazard, Exposure, Vulnerability), and quantifies the likely economic or insured losses arising [...]
22 October 2018 This project is focused on the analysis of historical tropical cyclones (also known as hurricanes or typhoons) and related wind records, including track positions, wind speed and central pressure. We have developed an automated process of carrying out such analyses on the cloud and enabled by web APIs. A straightforward [...]
2 October 2018 Bushfire (wildfire or forest fire) risk assessment has been a very common topic in research and practice. Many risk analysis projects, such as identifying likely causes of fire occurrences, mapping fire-prone areas and assessing Bushfire Attack Level (BAL) for buildings, are in place to assist the whole process of bushfire risk [...]
25 September 2018 For flood risk assessment, one may develop flood hazard maps directly or just use existing maps which are often associated with modelled hazard return periods. The quality of each flood map is up to a range of factors, such as the quality of elevation and rainfall inputs, modelling methods, and [...]
31 August 2018 This blog summarises some of our latest activities of monitoring, modelling and mapping major hazardous events with Earth observation and geospatial big data analytics, the two methods that are increasingly important and indispensable for a wide range of environmental studies. We routinely apply our own advanced image analysis software (Spectral Discovery) [...]
18 June 2018 Almost every industry has some types of exposure data, and its data quality and analysis are crucial for overall exposure management and decision making. For the businesses dealing with environmental, industrial, technological and man-made hazards and risk, the spatial and temporal accuracy of the underlying exposure data is among the most important. [...]
8 June 2018 The public release of BigData Earth's Location Profile APIs is a milestone in our vision of achieving API-first, cloud-based big data analytics and innovative solutions. [Update 31 August 2018: APIs Version 2.0 out of beta] The set of APIs released now reflects our substantial R&D in the following major applications over [...]
18 April 2018 The Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) released the long-awaited Socio-Economic Indexes for Areas (SEIFA, based on 2016 Census) dataset on 27 March 2018 (link). SEIFA is a modelled measure by integrating a wide range of social and economic attributes about the Australian population in an geographic area. SEIFA is generally regarded as one [...]