CSDE Hosts D4 Hack Week on Social Science and Climate-related Flooding with Support from NOAA and NIH
Posted: 7/11/2024 (CSDE Research)
CSDE affiliates Ann Bostrom, Sara Curran, and Sameer Shah are collaborating on an upcoming UW-hosted 2024 D4 Hack Week: Disasters, Demography, Disparities, and Decisions (September 9-13). This week-long hack-a-thon is supported by a partnership between CSDE, the National Science Foundation AI Institute for Research on Trustworthy AI in Weather, Climate, and Coastal Oceanography (AI2ES), and the UW’s eScience Institute. Funding for the workshop derives from a grant from NOAA to AI2ES (Award NA23OAR40505031) and a center grant to CSDE (P2C HD042828) from the Population Dynamics Branch at the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institutes of Child Health and Human Development.
During the D4 Hack Week, seven interdisciplinary teams of 40 researchers from across the country will join up to focus on the data and analytic challenges of linking climate- and weather-related impacts and mitigation efforts to human behavior, health, and well-being by:
- Investigate the human behavior and societal adaptive responses to, and impacts of, severe weather and climate-related events, particularly flooding associated with atmospheric rivers, hurricanes, and severe storms, but also including other extreme events such as heat or fire.
- Address the research gaps linking mitigation to adaptation and resilience in relation to severe weather. This will involve exploring co-benefits for human well-being from climate adaptation strategies that will further contribute to resilience to extreme weather events and climate mitigation.
- Explore pathways to better understand the dynamics of decisions and population disparities in responses to and impacts of past extreme climate / weather events.
The workshop will create improved data products and methods (data integration, data assimilation, analytic tools, new approaches to analyses) that integrate social and weather and/or climate data across space and time, through interdisciplinary collaborations. Data products should inform decision models that can guide decision making to address the needs of individuals, households, neighborhoods, and communities, with projections of impacts on the scales of minutes to hours, days, weeks, or years. Data and their analyses should be capable of informing impact analysis and risk reduction planning.
The larger initiative is part of a NOAA investment of $10 million to support social science research related to flooding services and products. This is part of President Biden’s Investing in America agenda. The funding will allow NOAA to understand how the public uses emergency communication during atmospheric events such as flooding to then evaluate how to best help communities prepare for weather emergencies.