Natural Hazards and Earth System Sciences (NHESS) is an interdisciplinary and international journal dedicated to the public discussion and open-access publication of high-quality studies and original research on natural hazards and their consequences. Embracing a holistic Earth system science approach, NHESS serves a wide and diverse community of research scientists, practitioners, and decision makers concerned with detection of natural hazards, monitoring and modelling, vulnerability and risk assessment, and the design and implementation of mitigation and adaptation strategies, including economical, societal, and educational aspects.
The scope of NHESS includes the following:
For peer-reviewed publication NHESS considers research articles, review articles, brief communications, comments & replies, and corrigenda. NHESS also publishes solicited book reviews. Papers submitted to NHESS can address different techniques and approaches including theory, modelling, experiments, case studies, and instrumentations. The journal covers the following broad subject areas, which are used to categorize the paper for review:
This list is not exhaustive or ordered by rank, and the journal will consider submissions on other subject areas. Contributions dealing with multidisciplinary aspects of natural hazards and their consequences are welcome.
Natural Hazards and Earth System Sciences utilizes an innovative two-stage publication process designed to (a) provide a lasting record of scientific discussion on the journal topics, (b) maximize the effectiveness and transparency of the review process, (c) enable rapid publication of new scientific results and achievements, and (d) make scientific publications freely accessible.
In the first stage, papers that pass a preliminary editorial screening are immediately published in Natural Hazards and Earth System Sciences Discussions (NHESSD). The submissions are then subject to an interactive public discussion. In this discussion phase, the referees' comments (anonymous or identified), additional short comments by members of the scientific community (identified), as well as the authors' replies to the editor, the referees, and peers are also published in NHESSD. In the second stage, the peer-review process is completed; following acceptance the final revised papers are published in Natural Hazards and Earth System Sciences (NHESS).
To ensure publication precedence for authors, and to provide a lasting record of scientific discussion, NHESSD and NHESS are both registered with an International Standard Serial Number (ISSN), permanently archived, and fully citable.
Natural Hazards and Earth System Sciences also provides an effective way of publishing special issues focused on specific topics. For each special issue the individual papers are published as soon as they are available, and they are linked electronically (for more information, see special issues).