An Original Multi-Hazard Meteorological Risk Assessment Framework for Critical Infrastructure in the Niger Delta Oil-Producing States

Critical infrastructure in Nigeria's Niger Delta oil-producing states, including pipelines, flow stations, export terminals, and refineries, is exposed to a complex portfolio of concurrent meteorological hazards including extreme rainfall, flooding, lightning, strong winds, and dense fog, yet multi-hazard meteorological risk assessment frameworks for this environment do not exist in the scientific or engineering literature. This study develops an original multi-hazard meteorological risk framework for critical infrastructure across Rivers, Delta, and Bayelsa states, representing a novel methodological contribution at the interface of meteorology, risk science, and petroleum engineering. The framework development draws on extreme value analysis of meteorological hazard intensities using NiMet records and ERA5 reanalysis, probabilistic hazard dependency modelling using vine copulas to capture inter-hazard correlations, and a consequence model calibrated from documented weather-related infrastructure incident records obtained from the Nigerian Upstream Petroleum Regulatory Commission (NUPRC). A geographic information system-based risk mapping methodology produces spatially explicit multi-hazard risk scores at one-kilometre resolution across the study area. Original theoretical contributions include derivation of a joint hazard exceedance probability formula accommodating up to five concurrent meteorological hazards and a novel compound weather scenario generator for infrastructure resilience stress testing. Application of the framework to a representative pipeline network demonstrates that compound rainfall-flood-lightning hazard scenarios increase aggregate infrastructure risk by 2.3 times compared to single-hazard assessments commonly used in current practice. Keywords: multi-hazard, critical infrastructure, Niger Delta, vine copula, oil sector.