NH11C-04
Communicating Flood Risk with Street-Level Data
Monday, 14 December 2015: 08:55
309 (Moscone South)
Brett F Sanders1, Richard Matthew2, Douglas Houston2, Wing H Cheung2, Beth Karlin2, Jochen Schubert1, Timu Gallien3, Adam Luke1, Santina Contreras2, Kristen Goodrich2, David Feldman2, Victoria Basolo2, Kimberly Serrano4 and Abigail Reyes4, (1)University of California Irvine, Civil and Environmental Engineering, Irvine, CA, United States, (2)University of California Irvine, Planning, Policy and Design, Irvine, CA, United States, (3)University of San Diego, San Diego, CA, United States, (4)University of California Irvine, Sustainability Initiatives, Irvine, CA, United States
Abstract:
Coastal communities around the world face significant and growing flood risks that require an accelerating adaptation response, and fine-resolution urban flood models could serve a pivotal role in enabling communities to meet this need. Such models depict impacts at the level of individual buildings and land parcels or “street level” - the same spatial scale at which individuals are best able to process flood risk information - constituting a powerful tool to help communities build better understandings of flood vulnerabilities and identify cost-effective interventions. To measure understanding of flood risk within a community and the potential impact of street-level models, we carried out a household survey of flood risk awareness in Newport Beach, California, a highly urbanized coastal lowland that presently experiences nuisance flooding from high tides, waves and rainfall and is expected to experience a significant increase in flood frequency and intensity with climate change. Interviews were completed with the aid of a wireless-enabled tablet device that respondents could use to identify areas they understood to be at risk of flooding and to view either a Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) flood map or a more detailed map prepared with a hydrodynamic urban coastal flood model (UCI map) built with grid cells as fine as 3 m resolution and validated with historical flood data. Results indicate differences in the effectiveness of the UCI and FEMA maps at communicating the spatial distribution of flood risk, gender differences in how the maps affect flood understanding, and spatial biases in the perception of flood vulnerabilities.
