Abstract
Flash flood is among the most catastrophic natural hazards which causes disruption in the environment and societies. Flash flood is mainly initiated by intense rainfall, and due to its rapid onset (within six hours of rainfall), taking action for effective response is challenging. Building resilience to flash floods require understanding of the socio-economic characteristics of the societies and their vulnerability to these extreme events. This study provides a comprehensive assessment of socio-economic vulnerability to flash floods and investigates the main characteristics of flash flood hazard, i.e. frequency, duration, severity, and magnitude. A socio-economic vulnerability index is developed at the county level across the Contiguous United States (CONUS). For this purpose, an ensemble of social and economic variables from the US Census and the Bureau of Economic Analysis were analyzed. Then, the coincidence of socio-economic vulnerability and flash flood hazard were investigated to identify the critical and non-critical regions. Results show that the southwest U.S. experienced severe flash flooding with high magnitude, whereas the Northern Great Plains experience lower severity and frequency. Critical counties (high-vulnerable-hotspot) are mostly located in the southern and southwestern parts of the U.S. The majority of counties in the Northern Great Plains indicate a non-critical status.
Highlights
Flash floods impose extensive damage and disruption to societies, and they are among the deadliest natural hazards worldwide
This study introduces a new algorithm for building the socio-economic vulnerability, which is based on Probabilistic Principal Components Analysis (PPCA) introduced by Tipping and Bishop[54], which overcomes the shortcomings of Principal Component Analysis (PCA)
The resemblance of the flash flood characteristics and the Socio-Economic Vulnerability Index (SEVI) is evaluated over the Contiguous United States (CONUS)
Summary
Flash floods impose extensive damage and disruption to societies, and they are among the deadliest natural hazards worldwide. Despite the significant advances in defining and formulating vulnerability[21,22,23,24], there still remains disparities in interpretation of vulnerability between the risk/hazard research and human-environmental research communities Both communities acknowledge that vulnerability is composed of exposure, sensitivity, and response or resilience to the compound effects of both human and environmental systems[25,26,27,28]. Vulnerability analyses are mainly classified into two groups that either (1) investigate the natural hazard characteristics and the physical attributes that aggravate the loses, which can be summarized as biophysical vulnerability, or (2) address the compound effect of socio-economic status and exposure, which directly affect the impacts[29]. Socio-economic vulnerability can address the root causes of damages to societies by investigating the social status, economic growth, population limitations, and several other characteristics[16]. Several other authors have discussed, in much greater details, many of the important aspects of social vulnerability and its measures[23,27,30,31]
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