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Human-centric characterization of life activity flood exposure shifts focus from places to people

Nature Cities volume 1, pages 264–274 (2024)Cite this article

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Abstract

A human-centric approach to assessing flood exposure moves beyond traditional spatial assessment by quantifying flood exposure based on life activity. This novel method characterizes flood exposure by measuring dwell time in flood-prone areas, using fine-resolution, anonymized smartphone data. Comparative analysis across 18 US cities reveals important disparities in life activity flood exposure (LAFE) and highlights the influence of urban forms and structures on LAFE. Furthermore, the research uncovers bimodal distributions in LAFE, indicating disparities even among cities with similar spatial flood risks. By focusing on the effect of daily human activities in flood-prone areas, this approach offers a more comprehensive understanding of flood impacts on daily activities and socioeconomic factors. The findings provide urban scientists and flood risk managers with a practical tool, underscoring the importance of human activity patterns in flood risk assessment, and offer valuable insights for enhanced analysis of flood exposure and risk.

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Fig. 1: Conceptual representation of LAFE.
Fig. 2: Bimodal LAFE distribution and spatial flood hazards across five example counties.
Fig. 3: LAFE distribution in Philadelphia and Harris County.
Fig. 4: Evaluation of latent flood exposure and immunity.
Fig. 5: Relationship between PLAFE and spatial flood-hazard extent.
Fig. 6: A comprehensive representation of PLAFE in various CBGs within the studied counties.

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Data availability

The data used in this study are not publicly available under the legal restrictions of the data provider. Interested readers can request it from Spectus (https://spectus.ai/).

Code availability

The code that supports the findings of this study is available from the corresponding authors upon request.

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Acknowledgements

We gratefully acknowledge the financial support for this research provided by the National Science Foundation (NSF) under CRISP 2.0 Type 2, grant no. 1832662 (A.M.), and the Texas A&M University through the X-Grant Program, grant no. 699 (A.M.). We acknowledge the work by J. Ma in the collection, processing and ideation of the HMI and UCI indexes used in this study. We also acknowledge data support from Spectus.

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  1. Zachry Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Texas A&M University, College Station, TX, USA

    Akhil Anil Rajput, Chenyue Liu, Zhewei Liu & Ali Mostafavi

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  1. Akhil Anil Rajput
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  2. Chenyue Liu
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Contributions

A.A.R., C.L., Z.L. and A.M. designed research. A.A.R., C.L. and Z.L. performed research. A.A.R. and C.L. contributed new analytic tools. A.A.R. and C.L. analyzed data. A.A.R., C.L., Z.L. and A.M. wrote the paper.

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Correspondence to Zhewei Liu.

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Nature Cities thanks Saman Ghaffarian, Ugonna Nkwunonwo and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

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Rajput, A.A., Liu, C., Liu, Z. et al. Human-centric characterization of life activity flood exposure shifts focus from places to people. Nat Cities 1, 264–274 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s44284-024-00043-7

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