Quantifying human mobility perturbation and resilience in Hurricane Sandy.

Area of Science:

• Environmental Science
• Urban Mobility Studies
• Disaster Resilience Research

Background:

• Human mobility is significantly impacted by environmental changes and natural disasters.
• Understanding movement patterns during extreme events is crucial but limited by data availability and precision.
• Previous studies utilized trip distance, radius of gyration, and visited locations to analyze mobility.

Purpose of the Study:

• To analyze human mobility patterns during and after Hurricane Sandy using high-resolution data.
• To investigate the correlation between mobility during steady and perturbed states.
• To assess the resilience of human movement trajectories in response to hurricanes.

Main Methods:

• Utilized high-resolution individual movement data from New York City during Hurricane Sandy (2012).
• Analyzed human movement trajectories, including trip distance distribution and radius of gyration.
• Examined parameters such as the center of mass and radius of gyration during and after the hurricane.

Main Results:

• Human movements followed truncated power-law distributions, with a higher beta value in the first 24 hours post-storm.
• A strong correlation was found between the center of mass and radius of gyration values during steady and perturbed states.
• Human mobility trajectories demonstrated significant perturbation but also remarkable resilience.

Conclusions:

• Human mobility exhibits resilience despite significant perturbations during hurricanes.
• Steady-state mobility data may offer predictive insights into responses during natural disasters.
• Findings can inform more effective evacuation and emergency response planning for coastal urban areas.