Hazard indicator conventions

Introduction

As discussed briefly in the introduction to Physrisk, a hazard indicator is a measure that quantifies a hazard. Indicators are typically functions of location (e.g. latitude/longitude), climate scenario (e.g. SSP585) and time (e.g. 2080 projection); that is, hazard indicators are typically available for the current climate and for future climate under different possible pathways — or at least this is true of the data sets most useful for assessing the impact of climate change. The hazard indicators of particular interest are those used by vulnerability models. In Physrisk, VulnerabilityModel instances request hazard indicators from HazardModel instances. A HazardModel must implement a get_hazard_data method. In their implementation, hazard models may source indicator data via API calls — typically where a commercial API is used, but also as a way to improve performance — or by looking up data stored in raster or shapefile format or indeed looking up data via a database key (e.g. indexing based on Quadbin, H3 or similar). Hazard indicator data, both public domain and commercial, is probably most commonly stored/distributed in raster format. Efficient access of raster data is therefore an important topic.