Advancing tsunami risk assessment by improving spatio-temporal population exposure and evacuation modeling

Sergio Freire (), Christoph Aubrecht and Stephanie Wegscheider

Natural Hazards: Journal of the International Society for the Prevention and Mitigation of Natural Hazards, 2013, vol. 68, issue 3, 1324 pages

Abstract: Tsunamis are among the most destructive and lethal of coastal hazards. These are time-specific events, and despite directly affecting a narrow strip of coastline, a single occurrence can have devastating effects and cause massive loss of life, especially in urbanized coastal areas. In this work, in order to consider the time dependence of population exposure to tsunami threat, the variation of spatio-temporal population distribution in the daily cycle is mapped and analyzed in the Lisbon Metropolitan Area. High-resolution daytime and nighttime population distribution maps are developed using ‘intelligent dasymetric mapping,’ that is, applying areal interpolation to combine best-available census data and statistics with land use and land cover data. Workplace information and mobility statistics are considered for mapping daytime distribution. In combination with a tsunami hazard map, information on infrastructure, land use and terrain slope, the modeled population distribution is used to assess people’s evacuation speed, applying a geospatial evacuation modeling approach to the city of Lisbon. The detailed dynamic population exposure assessment allows producing both daytime and nighttime evacuation time maps, which provide valuable input for evacuation planning and management. Results show that a significant amount of population is at risk, and its numbers increase dramatically from nighttime to daytime, especially in the zones of high tsunami flooding susceptibility. Also, full evacuation can be problematic in the daytime period, even if initiated immediately after a major tsunami-triggering earthquake. The presented approach greatly improves tsunami risk assessment and can benefit all phases of the disaster management process. Copyright Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2013

Keywords: Tsunami; Risk mapping; Population exposure; Dasymetric mapping; Evacuation; Lisbon (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1007/s11069-013-0603-4 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:nathaz:v:68:y:2013:i:3:p:1311-1324

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/economics/journal/11069

DOI: 10.1007/s11069-013-0603-4

Access Statistics for this article

Natural Hazards: Journal of the International Society for the Prevention and Mitigation of Natural Hazards is currently edited by Thomas Glade, Tad S. Murty and Vladimír Schenk

More articles in Natural Hazards: Journal of the International Society for the Prevention and Mitigation of Natural Hazards from Springer, International Society for the Prevention and Mitigation of Natural Hazards
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().