RAPID: Acquisition and curation of time-sensitive field data from severely flooded neighborhoods in New York City from tropical storm Ophelia for environmental sustainability study

Recent extreme climate events have caused disastrous outcomes in New York City and other coastal towns on the east coast. Torrential rain with record-breaking intensity brought by the remnants of tropical storm Ophelia left large areas of neighborhoods flooded, transportation systems shut down, schools stranded, and properties damaged. More than 8 inches of rain fell in parts of the NYC from Thursday Sept. 28 to Friday Sept. 29. As the result of these flooding events, perishable data such as high-water marks indicating the level of flooding in different neighborhoods are highly time-sensitive and require timely response to be preserved for future study. There is an urgent need to collect and curate data to understand and analyze vulnerabilities in the communities especially underserved ones. The objective of this project is to collect perishable data in neighborhoods that were severely flooded including images of the high-water marks of flooded neighborhood post flooding events and the forecasted and recorded precipitation to help stakeholders assess their design guidelines for future flooding events and mitigation plans. Multi-modal data from satellite imagery, weather radar imagery, road cameras, as well as people’s responses in social media posts will also be collected and curated for potential future use in building time lapse and high-fidelity visualization tools to help stakeholders and communities with more informed decision making and explore more effective outreach and flood-risk communications. Documenting time-sensitive perishable data on a hyperlocal scale provides valuable data for the study of environmental sustainability of communities under climate extremes. Representing and interpreting these data in an interactive map could provide stakeholders and at-risk communities with easy-to-digest information to analyze risk and develop strategies for more effective mitigation plans. This outcome of this project will help address such questions as how New York City is prepared to respond to such weather extreme events since Hurricanes Sandy and Ida, how and when weather warnings are issued, how communities in low-lying and flood-prone areas are informed and prepared for emergency, what are the infrastructure projects in place and how to assess their effectiveness, what data was used in generating the current flood map, and are there more targeted infrastructure solutions to protect the communities. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.