Brief Communication: Structured Virtual Expert Panels for Interdisciplinary Ideation in Natural Hazard Science

Abstract. We present a virtual expert panel workflow for early-stage interdisciplinary ideation in natural hazard research. Using the Six Thinking Hats framework, a moderator questions multiple virtual experts to elicit points of consensus, contested assumptions, knowledge gaps, and follow-up clarifications. We demonstrate this workflow using a debris-flow monitoring case at the Illgraben, Switzerland. The panel highlights concept drift: year-to-year environmental change shifts the link between seismic signals and event labels and reduces machine-learning generalization. The output motivates ideas on deployment-realistic evaluation, including time-ordered data splits for training and testing, and forward-chaining validation. The workflow provides a traceable record for hypothesis formulation.