Disclaimer: This project idea is the intellectual property of the Urban Flooding Analytics Team.
Team: Urban Flooding Analytics Team (WINNER, 2018)
Team Members:
Nathaniel Zinda and Sett Hein, Baruch College
Augustus Kaptko, New York City College of Technology
Link to Business Case Analysis.
Click here to watch the video of this team presenting at the Final Presentation of the CUNY-IBM Watson Competition 2018.
Project Overview – Chronic hazards, such as sea level rise and precipitation, present an increasing risk to New York City. According to the New York City Panel on Climate Change (2015), sea levels are expected to rise anywhere between 11 inches to 21 inches by the year 2050, and up to 50 inches by 2100. Precipitation events are likewise projected to increase. By 2050, the panel estimates that normal events of precipitation will increase from 11% to 13%, and intense events of precipitation will increase by 25% (NYCPCC, 2015). The City predicts that a Sandy-like event in 2050 could result in $90 billion in economic losses – compared to the $19 billion from Sandy itself – because of sea level rise alone (OneNYC, 2015).
Problem – The Mayor’s Office of Recovery & Resiliency (ORR) relies heavily on the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s (FEMA) 2007 Effective Flood Insurance Rate Map (FIRM) and the 2015 Preliminary Flood Insurance Rate Map (PFIRM) to assess the flood risk across the city and determine the OneNYC initiatives for City agencies to implement. Unfortunately, FEMA’s flood maps are notoriously inadequate. Furthermore, even the new maps do not account for rapid rain accumulation in the event of intense precipitation.
Approach to address the problem – The IBM Watson Flood Mapping Software (Watson FMS) represents a novel approach to the collection, processing, and visualization of flood data. The application leverages Watson’s Natural Language Understanding (NLU) and Visual Recognition to extract data from unstructured Twitter posts during a disaster- or intense storm- situation and uses that data to construct a crowdsourced map of where residents experience flooding throughout the city.
Benefits and Impacts – While this proposal is primarily focused on the benefit that Watson FMS will have on the strategic planning efforts of the Office of Recovery & Resiliency, the software has many other potential applications. The Department of Emergency Management, for example, could use Watson FMS to improve their emergency response in the event of a hurricane or related natural disaster. Real-time flood data would provide the agency with broad-based situational awareness and help them prioritize their rescue efforts in the most efficient way possible. Furthermore, in the immediate aftermath of a disaster, a crowdsourced flood map would provide invaluable data to federal and state relief agencies as they coordinate their response efforts.