Volcanic ash is an increasingly common, long-range hazard, impacting on our globalised society. The Asia-Pacific region is rapidly developing as a major contributor to the global population and economy and is home to one-quarter of the world's active volcanoes. Here we present a regional-scale volcanic ash hazard assessment for the Asia-Pacific using a newly developed framework for Probabilistic Volcanic Ash Hazard Analysis (PVAHA). This PVAHA was undertaken using the Volcanic Ash Probabilistic Assessment of Hazard (VAPAH) algorithm. The VAPAH algorithm considered a magnitude-frequency distribution of eruptions and associated volcanic ash load attenuation relationships for the Asia-Pacific, and integrated across all possible events to arrive at an annual exceedance probability for sites of interest. The Asia-Pacific region was divided into six sub-regions (e.g. Indonesia, Philippines and Southeast Asia, Melanesia/Australia, Japan/Taiwan, New Zealand/Samoa/Tonga/Fiji and Russia/China/Mongolia/ Korea) characterised by 276 source volcanoes each with individual magnitude-frequency relationships. Sites for analysis within the Asia-Pacific region were limited to land-based locations at 1-km grid spacing, within 500 km of a volcanic source. The Indonesian sub-region exhibited the greatest volcanic ash hazard in the region at the 100-year timeframe, with additional sources (in Japan, the Philippines, Papua New Guinea, Kamchatka -Russia and New Zealand) along plate boundaries manifesting a high degree of hazard at the 10,000-year timeframe. Disaggregation of the volcanic ash hazard for individual sites of interest provided insight into the primary causal factors for volcanic ash hazard at capital cities in Papua New Guinea, the Philippines and Japan. This PVAHA indicated that volcanic ash hazard for Port Moresby was relatively low at all timeframes. In contrast to this, Jakarta, Manila and Tokyo are characterised by high degrees hazard at all timeframes. The greatest hazard was associated with Tokyo and the PVAHA was able to quantify that the large number of sources impacting on this location was the causal factor contributing to the hazard. This evidence-based approach provides important insights for decision makers responsible for strategic planning and can assist with prioritising regions of interest for more detailed volcanic ash hazard modelling and local scale planning.

Significant advances have been made in recent years in probabilistic analysis of geological hazards. Analyses of this kind are concerned with producing estimates of the probability of occurrence of a hazard at a site given the location, magnitude, and frequency of hazardous events around that site; in particular Probabilistic Seismic Hazard Analysis (PSHA). PSHA is a method for assessing and expressing the probability of earthquake hazard for a site of interest, at multiple spatial scales, in terms of probability of exceeding certain ground motion intensities. Probabilistic methods for multi-scale volcanic ash hazard assessment are less developed. The modelling framework presented here, Probabilistic Volcanic Ash Hazard Analysis (PVAHA), adapts the seismologically based PSHA technique for volcanic ash. PVAHA considers a magnitude-frequency distribution of eruptions and associated volcanic ash load attenuation relationships and integrates across all possible events to arrive at an annual exceedance probability for each site across a region of interest. The development and implementation of the Volcanic Ash Probabilistic Assessment tool for Hazard (VAPAH), as a mechanism for facilitating multi-scale PVAHA, is also introduced. VAPAH outputs are aggregated to generate maps that visualise the expected volcanic ash hazard for sites across a region at timeframes of interest and disaggregated to determine the causal factors which dominate volcanic ash hazard at individual sites. VAPAH can be used to identify priority areas for more detailed PVAHA or local scale ash dispersal modelling that can be used to inform disaster risk reduction efforts.

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Water detection algorithms are now being routinely applied to continental and global archives of satellite imagery. However, water resource management decisions typically take place at the waterbody rather than pixel scale. Here, we present a workflow for generating polygons of persistent waterbodies from Landsat observations, enabling improved monitoring and management of water assets across Australia. We use Digital Earth Australia’s (DEA) Water Observations from Space (WOfS) product, which provides a water classified output for every available Landsat scene, to determine the spatial locations and extents of waterbodies across Australia. We generated a polygon set of waterbodies that identified 295,906 waterbodies ranging in size from 3125 m2 to 4820 km2. Each polygon was used to generate a time series of WOfS, providing a history of the change in surface area of each waterbody every ~16 days since 1987. We demonstrate the applications of this new dataset, DEA Waterbodies, to understanding local through to national-scale surface water spatio-temporal dynamics. DEA Waterbodies provides new insights into Australia’s water availability and enables the monitoring of important landscape features such as lakes and dams, improving our ability to use earth observation data to make meaningful decisions.

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