Assessment, Risk Management, & Knowledge for Coastal Flood Risk Management in Urban Areas
Today, over 600 million people live in critical coastal zones (i.e. areas 10m or less above sea level) and almost 2/3rd of the world’s cities with more than 5 million inhabitants fall within such zones. The inhabitants and assets of these communities are increasingly at risk of coastal flooding as an outgrowth of rising sea levels and heightened development and population growth in these areas. Current flood models fail to consider the presence of subsurface spaces, thus, potentially producing overly conservative mapping in some instances, while simultaneously failing to identify some of the most at risk portions of urban centers. Furthermore, past failures to achieve effective evacuation (despite foreknowledge of risk) have been attributed in part to weakness of risk communication approaches. To effectively protect both population and property, new tools are needed to exploit recent advances in remote sensing, distributed computing, and visualization. This is needed to create more accurate flood maps and affiliated tools and generate a radically new means of communicating highly localized risk conditions to local residents.
The project addresses flood risk assessment generation and risk communication in the context of 3 study areas in the US (NYC) and the Republic of Ireland (Dublin) and Northern Ireland (Belfast). For each, a 1 km2 area is considered. Photographs, aerial laser scans, and hyperspectral imagery will be treated as input streams to explore several paradigms for model building and risk communication. Data will be stored in a new form of integrated spatial database that is fully interoperable with numerical flood models that will then use high fidelity imagery to show risk by address. The information will feed into a visualization tool developed with input from interviews with local residents and governmental officials at each of the 3 locales. The work will be debuted at 3 local workshops and a series of “pop up” event stands.