CoPe EAGER: Establishing Interface Standards for Physical Exposure and Human Impacts Data Collection and Publication in Rapid Response to Coastal Hazards

East Carolina University, Greenville NC

Investigators

Abstract

Rapid response research is critical to understanding community resilience in the face of coastal hazards, such as tropical storms and flooding events. Yet, on-the-ground data collection efforts following these events are often uncoordinated and occur in different locations with different data collection approaches. The proposed work will establish standards to help coordinate rapid response data collection following major disasters. A coordinated approach to these efforts will improve the research community's ability to analyze and understand the impacts that disasters have on human livelihoods and the policy responses that are likely to protect at-risk communities from disaster exposures and improve recoveries in disaster-stricken communities. This research will democratize large data sets, enabling PIs with reduced research capacity to utilize multiple data sources, in order to test hypotheses related to coastlines and people. Further, this project will train one graduate student as well as a recently graduated undergraduate student through the NCAR SOARS program, which helps to broaden the participation of underrepresented groups in the sciences. The multidisciplinary project (atmospheric science, economics, engineering, and epidemiology) aims to define and document several standardized data formats that could be useful for integrated hazard exposure and human impact research, as well as provide software tools and a case study of the use of these standardized data formats, aiming to increase the value of open access data repositories. The multidisciplinary team will develop and apply interface standards for coastal hazard exposure data that enable use with human impacts analysis. The project will identify common levels of temporal and spatial aggregation that are used for researching human impacts of coastal hazard exposures, which will improve the reproducibility of research in the context of coastlines and people. Open-source software tools that reformat and enable visualization, exploration, and modeling of data by the broader research community will then be developed and published, removing barriers that are created by incompatibilities in data structure and format across related projects. A case study analysis will combine novel birth outcomes and groundwater pollution datasets from Hurricanes Matthew, Michael and Florence. This exercise will display the value of analyzing rapid response data in its native form while highlighting the broader intellectual benefits from reformatting and releasing data to the scientific community for re-analysis. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.