Thèses en cours

Real-time flood and forest fire hazard and vulnerability modeling

Sous la direction de :
Dennis Fox (Professeur, Université Côte d'Azur, UMR 7300 ESPACE)

In recent years, the Provence Alpes Côte d’Azur (PACA – SUD) region has been shaken by unprecedented natural catastrophes – extreme heat waves and forest fires in 2003, flooding in Draguignan in 2010 (27 dead), flooding in Cannes-Biot in 2015 (20 dead). These events are symptomatic of the Euro-Mediterranean region which combines both a high probability of a hazardous event and vulnerable densely populated urban/suburban areas, particularly in coastal and near-coastal zones. In France, a number of state agencies are involved in real-time risk management: Météo-France, SDIS, departmental agencies and local or municipal level agencies. In addition, some private companies now make a living providing real-time weather warning alerts. There is, however, no centralized real-time monitoring system that models multiple risks simultaneously, and current risk modeling focusses heavily on the probability of an extreme event (hazard) but very little (or not at all) on the vulnerability of the zone concerned, nor on potential interactions. For example, forest fire risk in France is estimated using the Canadian Fire Weather Index, but most forest fires are humanly-caused in the Wildland Urban Interface (WUI), and the current index does not take spatial patterns of buildings and roads into account. Similarly, flood forecasting is based on departmental-scale rainfall forecasts but not on modeled runoff at the municipal scale. The objective of the project is to create a real-time multi-risk model. The model will be elaborated based on data from SE France but will be suitable for the Euro-Mediterranean zone and beyond Floods, forest fire ignition and post-forest fire runoff model at this stage, but the model framework will be developed to favour the integration of risks such as forest fire spread (propagation), landslides, extreme heat, and air pollution in a postdoctoral phase.