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UW Disasters, Demography, Data Science & Decisions (D4) Hack Week to Provide NOAA with Insights on Managing Weather Challenges

Posted: 8/5/2024 (CSDE Seminar Series)

Fifty researchers from across the country will gather Sept. 9-13 at the University of Washington to tackle the challenge of providing timely, integrated information about community responses to severe climate-related events. The goal of the Disasters, Demography, Data Science & Decisions (D4) Hack Week, funded by NOAA and NIH support from a Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development research infrastructure grant (P2C HD042828), is to provide policymakers with better models and integrated data for anticipating communities’ needs before, during and after natural disasters.

Specifically, the effort seeks to understand the disparate impacts across populations, and the decisions that need to be made related to severe weather events like flooding, hurricanes and wildfire. Beside addressing data integration challenges, the teams will also develop AI tools for data integration and new approaches to managing uncertainties.

Researchers have formed seven teams tackling improvements in understanding the impacts of severe weather events including flooding from atmospheric rivers, wildfire, and tropical cyclones. Teams will present progress on their projects 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. Thursday, Sept. 12 and these can be viewed via livestream on the UW Center for Studies in Demography & Ecology (CSDE) YouTube channel.

 

The week-long hackathon — a type of hands-on, multi-day collaborative workshop bringing together a wide range of experts – is hosted by the NSF AI Institute for Research on Trustworthy AI in Weather, Climate, and Coastal Oceanography (AI2ES) (AI2ES), the UW Center for Studies in Demography & Ecology (CSDE), and the UW eScience Institute. The event will identify new types of data and ways for NOAA’s Societal Data Insights to integrate datasets, including advancements in AI and machine learning; and lessons learned to improve future weather communications tools.  During the hack-a-thon, researchers will showcase examples of how people and communities react before, during and after events.

The seven teams include projects such as:

  • A UW-led team exploring data on wildfires, household FEMA claims and demographics in California, to better understand federal disaster assistance after wildfires
  • A team from AI2ES and its partners (including members from NSF NCAR, Stanford, University of Oklahoma, and the UW), looking at surveys of individuals before, during and after a spring 2024 atmospheric river flooding event (an event with heavy rainfall over a sustained time) in Southern California to understand how people adapt their driving behavior to such extreme weather events
  • A multi-institutional team exploring how tropical cyclones affect human migration, focusing on locations and demographics, by combining county-level migration with data on tropical cyclones, wildfires, floods and other sources
  • A team exploring how current flood management tools might deal with future climate scenarios, using data from FEMA, the National Flood Insurance Program and other sources

The event is funded through a major NOAA initiative to improve risk communication during weather emergencies and by NIH support from a Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development research infrastructure grant (P2C HD042828). Participants are from Arizona State University, Brown University, Colorado State University, Columbia University, CUNY, Florida State University, MIT, the NSF National Center for Atmospheric Research, NOAA, Pennsylvania State University, the Population Council, Portland State University, Princeton University, The Weather Company, the University of Colorado, the University of Miami, the University of Oklahoma, the University of Wisconsin and the UW. Teams include experts in climate science, atmospheric sciences, weather data and models, demography, psychology, risk analysis and communication, geography, sociology, ecology, forest sciences, agriculture, and environmental policy.

 

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For more information about the event, contact: d4hackweek@uw.edu.