Flood Extent Mapping During Hurricane Florence With Repeat-Pass L-Band UAVSAR Images

Extreme precipitation events are intensifying due to a warming climate, which, in some cases, is leading to increases in flooding. Detection of flood extent is essential for flood disaster response, management, and prevention. However, it is challenging to delineate inundated areas through most publicly available optical and short-wavelength radar data, as neither can “see” through dense forest canopies. In 2018, Hurricane Florence produced heavy rainfall and subsequent record-setting riverine flooding in North Carolina, USA. NASA/JPL collected daily high-resolution full-polarized L-band Uninhabited Aerial Vehicle Synthetic Aperture Radar (UAVSAR) data between September 18th and 23rd. Here, we use UAVSAR data to construct a flood inundation detection framework through a combination of polarimetric decomposition methods and a Random Forest classifier. Validation of the established models with compiled ground references shows that the incorporation of linear polarizations with polarimetric decomposition and terrain variables significantly enhances the accuracy of inundation classification, and the Kappa statistic increases to 91.4% from 64.3% with linear polarizations alone. We show that floods receded faster near the upper reaches of the Neuse, Cape Fear, and Lumbee Rivers. Meanwhile, along the flat terrain close to the lower reaches of the Cape Fear River, the flood wave traveled downstream during the observation period, resulting in the flood extent expanding 16.1% during the observation period. In addition to revealing flood inundation changes spatially, flood maps such as those produced here have great potential for assessing flood damages, supporting disaster relief, and assisting hydrodynamic modeling to achieve flood-resilience goals

Use of attribute association error probability estimates to evaluate quality of medical record geocodes

BACKGROUND: The utility of patient attributes associated with the spatiotemporal analysis of medical records lies not just in their values but also the strength of association between them. Estimating the extent to which a hierarchy of conditional probability exists between patient attribute associations such as patient identifying fields, patient and date of diagnosis, and patient and address at diagnosis is fundamental to estimating the strength of association between patient and geocode, and patient and enumeration area. We propose a hierarchy for the attribute associations within medical records that enable spatiotemporal relationships. We also present a set of metrics that store attribute association error probability (AAEP), to estimate error probability for all attribute associations upon which certainty in a patient geocode depends. METHODS: A series of experiments were undertaken to understand how error estimation could be operationalized within health data and what levels of AAEP in real data reveal themselves using these methods. Specifically, the goals of this evaluation were to (1) assess if the concept of our error assessment techniques could be implemented by a population-based cancer registry; (2) apply the techniques to real data from a large health data agency and characterize the observed levels of AAEP; and (3) demonstrate how detected AAEP might impact spatiotemporal health research. RESULTS: We present an evaluation of AAEP metrics generated for cancer cases in a North Carolina county. We show examples of how we estimated AAEP for selected attribute associations and circumstances. We demonstrate the distribution of AAEP in our case sample across attribute associations, and demonstrate ways in which disease registry specific operations influence the prevalence of AAEP estimates for specific attribute associations. CONCLUSIONS: The effort to detect and store estimates of AAEP is worthwhile because of the increase in confidence fostered by the attribute association level approach to the assessment of uncertainty in patient geocodes, relative to existing geocoding related uncertainty metrics

Climate shocks and migration: an agent-based modeling approach

This is a study of migration responses to climate shocks. We construct an agent-based model that incorporates dynamic linkages between demographic behaviors, such as migration, marriage, and births, and agriculture and land use, which depend on rainfall patterns. The rules and parameterization of our model are empirically derived from qualitative and quantitative analyses of a well-studied demographic field site, Nang Rong district, Northeast Thailand. With this model, we simulate patterns of migration under four weather regimes in a rice economy: 1) a reference, ‘normal’ scenario; 2) seven years of unusually wet weather; 3) seven years of unusually dry weather; and 4) seven years of extremely variable weather. Results show relatively small impacts on migration. Experiments with the model show that existing high migration rates and strong selection factors, which are unaffected by climate change, are likely responsible for the weak migration response