Reflection of Typhoon Morakot-The Challenge of Compound Disaster Simulation

Climate change has altered locally singletype disasters to large-scale compound disasters because of increasing intensity and frequency of extreme rainfall events.The compound disasters can combine small-scale floods,debris flows,shallow landslides,deep-seated landslides,and landslide lakes into a large-scale single disaster event.Although simulation models and evaluation tools are available for single-type disasters,no single model is well developed for compound disasters due to the difficulty of handling the interrelationship between two successive single-type disasters.This study proposes a structure for linking available single-type simulation models to evaluate compound disasters and provides a useful tool of decision making for warning and planning of disaster reduction.