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Social vulnerability refers to how social positions affect the ability to access resources during a disaster or disturbance, but there is limited empirical examination of its spatial patterns in the Great Lakes Basin (GLB) region of North America. In this study, we map four themes of social vulnerability for the GLB by using the Center for Disease Control’s Social Vulnerability Index (CDC SVI) for every county in the basin and compare mean scores for each sub-basin to assess inter-basin differences. Additionally, we map LISA results to identify clusters of high and low social vulnerability along with the outliers across the region. Results show the spatial patterns depend on the social vulnerability theme selected, with some overlapping clusters of high vulnerability existing in Northern and Central Michigan, and clusters of low vulnerability in Eastern Wisconsin along with outliers across the basins. Differences in these patterns also indicate the existence of an urban–rural dimension to the variance in social vulnerabilities measured in this study. Understanding regional patterns of social vulnerability help identify the most vulnerable people, and this paper presents a framework for policymakers and researchers to address the unique social vulnerabilities across heterogeneous regions.
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This content will become publicly available on September 1, 2025
Risk Comparison of Hurricane Scenarios as Disruptions of Hydrologic Basin Order with Social Vulnerability Criteria
Economic damages of hurricanes and tropical cyclones are increasing faster than the populations and wealth of many coastal areas. There is urgency to update priorities of agencies engaged with risk assessment, risk mitigation, and risk communication across hundreds or thousands of water basins. This paper evaluates hydrology and social vulnerability factors to develop a risk register at a subbasin scale for which the priorities of agencies vary by storm scenario using publicly available satellite-based Earth observations. The novelty and innovation of this approach is the quantification and mapping of risk as a disruption of system order, while using social vulnerability indices and sensor data from disparate sources. The results assist with allocating resources across basins under several scenarios of hydrology and social vulnerability. The approach is in several parts as follows: first, a baseline order of basins is defined using the CDC/ATSDR social vulnerability index (SVI). Next, a set of storm scenarios is defined using Earth Observations and modeled data. Next, a swing-weight technique is used to update factor weights under each scenario. Lastly, the importance order of basins relative to the baseline order is used to compare the risk of scenarios across the study area. The risk is thus quantified (by least squares difference of order) as a disruption to the ordering of basins by social and hydrologic factors (i.e., SVI, precipitation, wind speed, and soil moisture), with attention to the most disruptive scenarios. An application is described with extensive mapping of hydrologic basins for Hurricane Ian to demonstrate a versatile method to address uncertainty of scenarios of storm nature and extent across coastal mega-regions.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1829004
- PAR ID:
- 10548257
- Publisher / Repository:
- ASCE
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- ASCE-ASME Journal of Risk and Uncertainty in Engineering Systems, Part A: Civil Engineering
- Volume:
- 10
- Issue:
- 3
- ISSN:
- 2376-7642
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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