Abstract
El Niño is an extreme weather event featuring unusual warming of surface waters in the eastern equatorial Pacific Ocean. This phenomenon is characterized by heavy rains and floods that negatively affect the economic activities of the impacted areas. Understanding how this phenomenon influences consumption behavior at different granularity levels is essential for recommending strategies to normalize the situation. With this aim, we performed a multi-scale analysis of data associated with bank transactions involving credit and debit cards. Our findings can be summarized into two main results: Coarse-grained analysis reveals the presence of the El Niño phenomenon and the recovery time in a given territory, while fine-grained analysis demonstrates a change in individuals' purchasing patterns and in merchant relevance as a consequence of the climatic event. The results also indicate that society successfully withstood the natural disaster owing to the economic structure built over time. In this study, we present a new method that may be useful for better characterizing future extreme events.
Highlights
El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO) is a climatic phenomenon consisting of a temperature increase in the equatorial Pacific area
To investigate how the ENSO events in February and March 2017 impacted consumption patterns in Lima, we examined how the relative frequency of merchant categories evolved in time using the Kullback-Leibler divergence (KLD)
We focus on the impact of the El Niño phenomenon on people through individual mobility Markov chain (MMC) as a proxy for whether an individual was affected
Summary
El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO) is a climatic phenomenon consisting of a temperature increase in the equatorial Pacific area. A crucial indicator of the presence of El Niño is the variation of the sea surface temperature, which causes changes in the worldwide climate. At the end of 2016 and in early 2017, ENSO had an abrupt change that caused heavy rains and floods. This atypical phenomenon is called El Niño costero. According to United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) [1], the first three months of 2017 witnessed the highest amount of human and material loss in Lima and in the northern regions of Peru caused by the coastal ENSO phenomenon. We focus on two main events that occurred in February and March 2017 (see Fig in [2])
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