These eight coastal cities sit on America's flood front line, and AI shows why
New York, New Orleans and Miami are among the eight cities along the US Gulf and Atlantic coasts facing the highest flood risk, according to a new study published in Science Advances. Scientists developed a new AI-driven framework and combined it with historical flood-damage data to not only identify high-risk coastal areas but also pinpoint the underlying factors driving that risk.
Severe flooding events have become increasingly common in the United States, partly due to rising sea levels and intensifying hurricane activity fueled by climate change. In addition to the risk to life, these disasters result in billions of dollars of property and infrastructure damage.
Traditional flood risk assessments often fall short because they focus primarily on where the water will go and overlook other factors that could make a bad situation even worse.
A new approach to risk
So Hemal Dey and Wanyun Shao at the University of Alabama developed a more integrated risk assessment framework that accounts for the complex interplay among the environment, a location's infrastructure, and the people living there.
The pair drew historical records of past flood damage and examined 16 factors. They fed all this data into three different types of AI (Random Forest, Support Vector Machine and Multilayer Perceptron) to identify which cities are at the greatest risk and why. The study measured these risks by looking at both general flood damage (GFD) and the more severe threat of extreme flood damage (EFD).
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