Human-Sensitive Quantification of City-Scale Human Activity Changes during Natural Disasters

In this pressing time of climate change, the nation’s civil infrastructure systems are challenged by more frequent and intensifying natural disasters. Natural disasters have a disruptive impact on human activities. In coping with ever-increasing disasters, research studies have strived to develop resilience strategies to build physically resilient infrastructure systems. However, there is a lack of research investigating the impact of disasters on human activities across different population groups. To address this limitation, this paper proposes a clustering-based method to analyze the changes in human activities during disasters in a human-sensitive way. The proposed method includes two components: (1) population group discovery to cluster atomic population units into distinctive population groups and (2) activity change quantification to quantify the changes in activity frequency for each identified population group. As a preliminary study, this paper focuses on presenting the proposed method and its implementation in analyzing the impact of Hurricane Ida on different population groups in Manhattan, NYC.