Coupling Physical Hazard and Evacuation/Sheltering Models: Overview and Application to Hurricane Matthew with and without Inland Flooding Considerations

Due to the inherent uncertainty in hurricane natural hazards, evacuation decisions are complex. For the case of evacuations in response to hurricanes, there are three important aspects that must be considered: 1) there is uncertainty in how the storms evolve; 2) there are many interactions within and across the natural, infrastructure, and human systems; and 3) the systems are dynamic. There has been significant research into hurricane forecasting and evacuations; however, none of these have looked at the connection of these three important aspects – dynamics, uncertainty, and system interactions – in a formalized, integrated model. During this project, we have developed a new integrated framework that models the hazards associated with the hurricane using an ensemble of probabilistic scenarios of the hurricane, which in turn is used to develop time-dependent, total water level (river + waves + surge + tide) and wind speed maps. That output is ingested by the infrastructure/decision-making model, which simulates the dynamic decision-making of emergency managers and residents and the dynamic movement of residents over the course of the event. For this presentation, an overview of the component parts of the framework will be presented, followed by an application to Hurricane Matthew where we compare the guidance the system provides for the case of including/not including inland flooding.