Atmospheric rivers, often described as a “firehose of moisture,” can bring intense rainfall to the West Coast, leading to intense inland flooding. How people perceive and respond to these risks isn’t always clear. To shed light on these decisions, a WPO-supported team came together for a “hack week” at the University of Washington in September 2024.
WPO’s Societal Data Insights Initiative (SDII) made an award to the National Science Foundation AI Institute for Research on Trustworthy AI in Weather, Climate, and Coastal Oceanography (AI2ES) in 2022, with a focus on inland flooding events, such as atmospheric rivers.
This past fall, the AI2ES team and collaborators organized and participated in the UW “Disasters, Demography, Disparities and Decisions (D4) Hack Week,” a hands-on, collaborative workshop. Part of WPO’s award to AI2ES included providing funding support for the D4 Hack Week itself.
By fostering an environment of problem-solving through innovation, the event not only allowed participants to explore new data and test novel data integration methods, but also consider some of the difficulties of integrating social and weather data and discuss paths forward.
Using data from a longitudinal survey taken from an atmospheric river event in March 2024, mobility and traffic information, and resources from SDII, the team developed programming code to tease out insights on how people change their driving behavior ahead of and during impactful atmospheric river events.
Using the insights and experiences from the D4 Hack Week, the AI2ES team will provide a final report on the Hack Week and conduct a refresh of the March 2024 longitudinal study.
