Steve Gray

End-user
About
Steve Gray

Lead end user

Research was undertaken to understand the seismic vulnerabilities of existing unreinforced masonry and limited ductile reinforced concrete buildings and methods to address them seismic retrofit; assess the risk of building stock through the development of an economic loss model with trial evaluation; and advance an end-use focused research utilisation project in the area of community risk reduction – York, Western Australia.
This project developed better predictions and forecasts for extreme water levels arising from storm surges, surface waves, continental shelf waves, meteorological tsunamis, mean sea level rise and the transition from tropical to extra-tropical cyclones.
The fundamental processes that cause erosion during storms are generally well understood and management strategies are available. However, the response of beaches to successive storms (storm clusters), such as those that damaged Australia’s east coast in 1974, is not well understood or managed, with the response of any given beach depending on its physical characteristics. Because of this, the likely effectiveness of a given management strategy may not be clear, such as beach nourishment (a remedial process where sand is added to a beach to restore its shape). This project developed a methodology and demonstrated it through two case study sites, which had different oceanographic and geological settings. The methodology combined expertise in statistical modelling, hydrodynamics, coastal geology, hazard mapping and impact analysis. The project integrated these approaches to develop tools, information and methods that can be used by others nationally.
The project demonstrated a pilot capability to deliver wind and rain impact forecasts for residential housing from an ensemble of weather prediction models runs. The project focused on the wind and rainfall impact from the 20-22 April 2015 East Coast Low in New South Wales. Through the utilisation of Geoscience Australia’s HazImp software, the research team developed and tested a workflow that integrated the numerical weather forecasts, vulnerability relationships and exposure data at the community level. The project set up the end-to-end workflow from wind and rain hazard to spatial impact. These spatial impact outputs were delivered into the Visual Weather system at the Bureau of Meteorology, foreshadowing the possibility of easily achievable future visualisation to operational meteorologists.

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