I am a senior researcher and project manager, mainly involved with natural hazard and risk assessment research (seismic hazard, multi-hazard concepts). I have previously undertaken research in geodynamics (sea-level change, glacial isostatic adjustment, satellite geodesy), and mineral exploration. I have experience in multi-sector international environments (industry, research, academia), including client and end-user liaison, teaching and mentoring, and project proposal preparation.
Risk analysis for natural hazards is usually carried out separately for the various pertinent haz... more Risk analysis for natural hazards is usually carried out separately for the various pertinent hazards in the considered regions or cities, often without attempting to combine these studies into a holistic risk assessment. However, effective decision making requires comprehensive information that includes all relevant hazard types within a region. In addition to the existing multi-risk approaches, this report aims to compare the single-type risk approaches and to identify their commonalities and differences and to identify existing or potential interfaces. Therefore, a literature review on single-type risk analysis rocedures considering earthquakes, meteorological extremes, wildfires, precipitation, iver floods, storm surges, landslides and volcanic risks has been undertaken. In articular, the scope of the reviews has been narrowed to the spatial scale of cities, to direct damages (economic and loss of life) and to state-of-the-art approaches with a strong focus on quantitative risk ...
The Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) has so far seen around 4 years worth of month... more The Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) has so far seen around 4 years worth of monthly gravity-field solutions being released to the scientific community. These are provided in the form of Stokes potential coefficients by the GRACE Science Data Service centers; the Center for Space Research, University of Texas (CSR), the GeoForschungsZentrum Potsdam (GFZ) and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory
We estimate the ice-mass loss in West Antarctica from the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment... more We estimate the ice-mass loss in West Antarctica from the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) using the following approach. First, we predict the gravity-field change over Antarctica arising from present-day ice-mass changes, mainly derived from satellite altimetry, and the ongoing glacial-isostatic adjustment (GIA), which is computed by subjecting a viscoelastic earth model to a thermomechanical reconstruction of Antarctica's late-Pleistocene
ABSTRACT The distribution and amount of potential losses due natural hazards are continuously, an... more ABSTRACT The distribution and amount of potential losses due natural hazards are continuously, and sometimes abruptly varying, spatially and temporally. Changes in damage distribution are dependent both on the specific natural hazard (for instance flood hazard can depend on the season and on the weather) and on the evolution of vulnerability (in terms of variation in size and composition of the exposed assets). Considering space and time, moreover, the most appropriate scales at which the changes occur have to be taken into account. Furthermore, spatio-temporal variability of multi-risk assessment is depending on the distribution and quality of the information upon which the assessment is made. This information is subject to uncertainties that also vary over time, for instance as new data are collected and integrated. Multi-risk assessment is therefore a dynamical process aiming for a continuous monitoring of the expected consequences of the occurring of one or more natural events, given an uncertain and incomplete description of both the involved hazards and the composition and vulnerability of the exposed assets. A novel multi-resolution, adaptive data collection approach is explored, which is of particular interest in countries where multi-scale, multi-risk assessment is sought but limited resources are available for intensive exposure and vulnerability data collection. In this case a suitable prioritisation of data collection is proposed as an adaptive sampling scheme optimized to trade off between data collection cost and loss estimation uncertainty. Preliminary test cases will be presented and discussed.
The Self-Organizing Seismic Early Warning Information Network (SOSEWIN) represents a new approach... more The Self-Organizing Seismic Early Warning Information Network (SOSEWIN) represents a new approach for Earthquake Early Warning Systems (EEWS), consisting in taking advantage of novel wireless communications technologies. It also sets out to overcome problems of insufficient node density, which typically affects present existing early warning systems, by having the SOSEWIN seismological sensing units being comprised of low-cost components (generally bought
Throughout the ages, earthquakes have been among the most disastrous natural phenomena, destroyin... more Throughout the ages, earthquakes have been among the most disastrous natural phenomena, destroying cities, killing human beings, and today threatening millions of people all over the world. Due to the rapid growth and development of urban settlements, ...
Mass changes in the polar regions are inferred by making use of about 4 years of Gravity Recovery... more Mass changes in the polar regions are inferred by making use of about 4 years of Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) gravity fields. The time series of each of the Stokes coefficients are decomposed into their linear, annual and semi-annual components, and we apply the Student's t-test to assess the statistical significance of the linear temporal trends in the Stokes potential coefficients. We solve the inverse-gravimetric problem by adjusting forward models describing the prominent geoid-height changes arising from ice-mass changes in Antarctica, Greenland, Alaska and Patagonia, and of the glacial-isostatic adjustment (GIA) due to the last glacial-interglacial transition. We show that, although all used data sets (GFZ, CSR; JPL and CNES) consistently reflect the prominent mass changes, differences in the mass-change estimates are considerably larger than the uncertainties estimated by the propagation of the GRACE errors. We then use the bootstrapping method based o...
Abstract Rapid improvements in telemetry technology and the general decrease in communication cos... more Abstract Rapid improvements in telemetry technology and the general decrease in communication costs have raised a growing interest in low-cost wireless sensing units. This is especially the case for structural monitoring purposes, where they are becoming a more ...
Risk analysis for natural hazards is usually carried out separately for the various pertinent haz... more Risk analysis for natural hazards is usually carried out separately for the various pertinent hazards in the considered regions or cities, often without attempting to combine these studies into a holistic risk assessment. However, effective decision making requires comprehensive information that includes all relevant hazard types within a region. In addition to the existing multi-risk approaches, this report aims to compare the single-type risk approaches and to identify their commonalities and differences and to identify existing or potential interfaces. Therefore, a literature review on single-type risk analysis rocedures considering earthquakes, meteorological extremes, wildfires, precipitation, iver floods, storm surges, landslides and volcanic risks has been undertaken. In articular, the scope of the reviews has been narrowed to the spatial scale of cities, to direct damages (economic and loss of life) and to state-of-the-art approaches with a strong focus on quantitative risk ...
The Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) has so far seen around 4 years worth of month... more The Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) has so far seen around 4 years worth of monthly gravity-field solutions being released to the scientific community. These are provided in the form of Stokes potential coefficients by the GRACE Science Data Service centers; the Center for Space Research, University of Texas (CSR), the GeoForschungsZentrum Potsdam (GFZ) and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory
We estimate the ice-mass loss in West Antarctica from the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment... more We estimate the ice-mass loss in West Antarctica from the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) using the following approach. First, we predict the gravity-field change over Antarctica arising from present-day ice-mass changes, mainly derived from satellite altimetry, and the ongoing glacial-isostatic adjustment (GIA), which is computed by subjecting a viscoelastic earth model to a thermomechanical reconstruction of Antarctica's late-Pleistocene
ABSTRACT The distribution and amount of potential losses due natural hazards are continuously, an... more ABSTRACT The distribution and amount of potential losses due natural hazards are continuously, and sometimes abruptly varying, spatially and temporally. Changes in damage distribution are dependent both on the specific natural hazard (for instance flood hazard can depend on the season and on the weather) and on the evolution of vulnerability (in terms of variation in size and composition of the exposed assets). Considering space and time, moreover, the most appropriate scales at which the changes occur have to be taken into account. Furthermore, spatio-temporal variability of multi-risk assessment is depending on the distribution and quality of the information upon which the assessment is made. This information is subject to uncertainties that also vary over time, for instance as new data are collected and integrated. Multi-risk assessment is therefore a dynamical process aiming for a continuous monitoring of the expected consequences of the occurring of one or more natural events, given an uncertain and incomplete description of both the involved hazards and the composition and vulnerability of the exposed assets. A novel multi-resolution, adaptive data collection approach is explored, which is of particular interest in countries where multi-scale, multi-risk assessment is sought but limited resources are available for intensive exposure and vulnerability data collection. In this case a suitable prioritisation of data collection is proposed as an adaptive sampling scheme optimized to trade off between data collection cost and loss estimation uncertainty. Preliminary test cases will be presented and discussed.
The Self-Organizing Seismic Early Warning Information Network (SOSEWIN) represents a new approach... more The Self-Organizing Seismic Early Warning Information Network (SOSEWIN) represents a new approach for Earthquake Early Warning Systems (EEWS), consisting in taking advantage of novel wireless communications technologies. It also sets out to overcome problems of insufficient node density, which typically affects present existing early warning systems, by having the SOSEWIN seismological sensing units being comprised of low-cost components (generally bought
Throughout the ages, earthquakes have been among the most disastrous natural phenomena, destroyin... more Throughout the ages, earthquakes have been among the most disastrous natural phenomena, destroying cities, killing human beings, and today threatening millions of people all over the world. Due to the rapid growth and development of urban settlements, ...
Mass changes in the polar regions are inferred by making use of about 4 years of Gravity Recovery... more Mass changes in the polar regions are inferred by making use of about 4 years of Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) gravity fields. The time series of each of the Stokes coefficients are decomposed into their linear, annual and semi-annual components, and we apply the Student's t-test to assess the statistical significance of the linear temporal trends in the Stokes potential coefficients. We solve the inverse-gravimetric problem by adjusting forward models describing the prominent geoid-height changes arising from ice-mass changes in Antarctica, Greenland, Alaska and Patagonia, and of the glacial-isostatic adjustment (GIA) due to the last glacial-interglacial transition. We show that, although all used data sets (GFZ, CSR; JPL and CNES) consistently reflect the prominent mass changes, differences in the mass-change estimates are considerably larger than the uncertainties estimated by the propagation of the GRACE errors. We then use the bootstrapping method based o...
Abstract Rapid improvements in telemetry technology and the general decrease in communication cos... more Abstract Rapid improvements in telemetry technology and the general decrease in communication costs have raised a growing interest in low-cost wireless sensing units. This is especially the case for structural monitoring purposes, where they are becoming a more ...
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Papers by K. Fleming