Human Behavior and Disasters

As part of a larger hub, Megalopolitan Coastal Transformation Hub (MACH), the lab will assist in answering a larger research question: How do households make adaptation decisions in response to perceived risks of sea-level rise? To overcome challenges in the dynamics of natural-human systems drive coastal climate risk, MACH will bring natural scientists, social scientists, civil engineers, and humanists together with coastal stakeholders and decision-makers in the New York City-New Jersey-Philadelphia region to co-produce knowledge that informs climate-resilient development pathways of coastal communities. The larger hub, managed at Rutgers, is focused on researching complex interactions between climate hazards and communities to inform governance of coastal risk.

Research Team

Lead: Victoria Ramenzoni, Ph.D.

• DeeDee Bennett Gayle, Ph.D.
• Elisabeth Gilmore, Ph.D.
• Manasa Bollempalli, Ph.D.
• Yvonne Dadson
• Nuzhat Fatema

Participant Recruitment

We are currently accepting participants in our study. Do you live in the South Philly area?

Perhaps you are eligible.

EMPOWER leverages state and federal computing investments, integrates with existing state-of-the-art weather observational infrastructure and data pipelines, aligns with crisis decision-making principles and protective action repertoires to protect lives and property, and provides modular capabilities for future integration of additional advanced sensor-based weather hazard monitoring networks. In short, EMPOWER equips the emergency management enterprise today with tools, data, and decision support analytics to manage the emergencies of tomorrow.

The State University of New York at Albany (UAlbany) project on the development and pilot of EMPOWER, a next-generation scalable decision-support tool suite for the emergency management enterprise. EMPOWER integrates advanced analytics, real-time localized high resolution mesonet-based weather data, critical infrastructure “lifelines”, social vulnerability data, and novel visualization capabilities to provide rapid assessment of changing weather conditions and their potential impacts on communities and critical infrastructure.