Flooding through the lens of mobile phone activity

Abstract

Natural disasters affect hundreds of millions of people worldwide every year. Emergency response efforts depend upon the availability of timely information, such as information concerning the movements of affected populations. The analysis of aggregated and anonymized Call Detail Records (CDR) captured from the mobile phone infrastructure provides new possibilities to characterize human behavior during critical events. In this work, we investigate the viability of using CDR data combined with other sources of information to characterize the floods that occurred in Tabasco, Mexico in 2009. An impact map has been reconstructed using Landsat-7 images to identify the floods. Within this frame, the underlying communication activity signals in the CDR data have been analyzed and compared against rainfall levels extracted from data of the NASA-TRMM project. The variations in the number of active phones connected to each cell tower reveal abnormal activity patterns in the most affected locations during and after the floods that could be used as signatures of the floods - both in terms of infrastructure impact assessment and population information awareness. The representativeness of the analysis has been assessed using census data and civil protection records. While a more extensive validation is required, these early results suggest high potential in using cell tower activity information to improve early warning and emergency management mechanisms.Comment: Submitted to IEEE Global Humanitarian Technologies Conference (GHTC) 201

Technologies to Support Community Flood Disaster Risk Reduction

“…For example, the PetaJakarta twitter application in Jakarta, Indonesia collected 150,000 tweets within 24 h of the onset of flooding on 5 February 2014, dynamically mapping where floods occurred across the city (Holderness and Turpin 2015). Patterns of mobile use can also give similar clues as to which regions are impacted most severely by flooding (Pastor-Escuredo et al 2014). In these studies, mobile phone usage was seen to increase in areas hardest hit by flooding.…”

Reviews of Geospatial Information Technology and Collaborative Data Delivery for Disaster Risk Management

“…Since mobile phone operators store CDR for billing purposes, the data are a valuable information source for mobility. CDR-based mobility data can help develop an epidemiological model of communicable diseases [101], disaster management during floods [102], and behavior models of evacuation [103], which can help in preparedness, response, and recovery operations. Some operational pilots have been demonstrated in past disasters [104,105].…”

Deriving human activity from geo-located data by ontological and statistical reasoning

“…From them, it is possible to infer with a certain level of accuracy, the activities humans are performing at every moment they are connected to the mobile network. Indeed, experiments in large-scale social dynamics have been conducted in the areas of public safety and emergency management [4,36,43], health and disease management [21,66], social and economic development [1,18,22], transport/infrastructure [5,32], urban planning [3,9,24,27,33,38,44] and international development, poverty [59] and more [7]. A large fraction of mobile phone data has been shown to be extremely useful for humanitarian and development applications (Robert Kirkpatrik UN 2013).…”