Uncertainty in Natural Hazards, Modeling and Decision Support: An Introduction to This Volume

This introduction provides an overview of the key concepts discussed in subsequent chapters of this book. The book provides a broad, cross-disciplinary overview of issues relating to uncertainty characterization, uncertainty communication, and decision support. It covers work currently occurring in uncertainty quantification of volcanic, earthquake, and landslide processes. The book focuses on advancements in uncertainty and risk assessment for natural hazards driven by biological, physical, and climatic factors. It illustrates how natural hazard sciences and modeling efforts vary across multiple dimensions in terms of data availability, sufficiency, and spatiotemporal scale, the relative amount and cumulative expertise of scientists working in each field, and the state of the science in quantitative uncertainty assessment. The book introduces a framework for identifying and classifying uncertainty, presents insights on communicating uncertainty across disciplines, and illustrates two current examples of operational decision support systems that incorporate uncertainty and probability.