Importance of soil and elevation characteristics for modeling hurricane-induced power outages

Steven Quiring (), Laiyin Zhu and Seth Guikema

Natural Hazards: Journal of the International Society for the Prevention and Mitigation of Natural Hazards, 2011, vol. 58, issue 1, 365-390

Abstract: Hurricanes can severely damage the electric power system, and therefore, predicting the potential impact of an approaching hurricane is of importance for facilitating planning and storm-response activities. A data mining approach, classification and regression trees (CART), was employed to evaluate whether the inclusion of soil and topographic variables improved the predictive accuracy of the power outage models. A total of 37 soil variables and 20 topographic variables were evaluated in addition to hurricane, power system, and environmental variables. Hurricane variables, specifically the maximum wind gust and duration of strong winds, were the most important variables for predicting power outages in all models. Although the inclusion of soil and topographic variables did not significantly improve the overall accuracy of outage predictions, soil type and soil texture are useful predictors of hurricane-related power outages. Both of these variables provide information about the soil stability which, in turn, influences the likelihood of poles remaining upright and trees being uprooted. CART was also used to evaluate whether environmental variables can be used instead of power system variables. Our results demonstrated that certain land cover variables (e.g., LC21, LC22, and LC23) are reasonable proxies for the power system and can be used in a CART model, with only a minor decrease in predictive accuracy, when detailed information about the power system is not available. Therefore, CART-based power outage models can be developed in regions where detailed information on the power system is not available. Copyright Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2011

Keywords: Hurricane; Electrical power system; Regression trees; Power outage; Soil; Elevation; Land use (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2011
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (16)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1007/s11069-010-9672-9 (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:58:y:2011:i:1:p:365-390

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

DOI: 10.1007/s11069-010-9672-9

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 ().