March 5, 2026 - Cascadia CoPes Hub Virtual Seminar Series

Updates to the FEMA National Risk Index

Nate Wood - National assessment of population exposure, evacuation potential, and average annualized losses in the U.S. to earthquake-generated tsunami threats

Abstract: The presentation will focus on the recently completed analysis to improve how the nation characterizes tsunami risk in the National Risk Index. It involved a multi-agency effort to estimate residential population exposure, evacuation potential, recurrence periods, and average annualized losses to credible distant and local, earthquake-generated tsunami sources across the entire United States.  

Jessica Ball - Improving the integration of USGS volcanic hazard zonation and threat assessment into the FEMA National Risk Index

Abstract: The initial release of FEMA's National Risk Index (NRI) spurred the amalgamation of disparate USGS volcano hazard assessments and threat rankings into a single national Volcanic Threat Layer. This presentation will focus the USGS Volcano Hazard Program's efforts to develop that layer and its integration into the revised NRI, including improving the representation of volcano hazard zones for annualized loss calculations, supplementing available datasets recording the damages incurred by volcanic activity, and accounting for volcanic ash impacts in light of the difficulty of simulating ashfall. 

Jacob Woodard- Constraining landslide frequency across the United States to inform county-level risk reduction

Abstract: The NRI requires estimates of landslide frequency across the United States. Previous estimates relied predominantly on landslide reports that are known to be biased and incomplete. We developed a new approach for estimating landslide frequency that accounts for the incompleteness in the landslide data while incorporating known controls of landslide occurrence rates. These updates provide a better representation of landslide frequencies than the estimates used in the previous NRI release.