Abstract
Understanding human mobility patterns becomes essential in crisis management and response. This study analyzes the effect of two hurricanes in the United States on human mobility patterns, more specifically on trip distance (displacement), radius of gyration, and mean square displacement, using Twitter data. The study examines three geographical regions which include urbanized areas (Houston, Texas; Miami-Dade County, Florida) and both rural and urbanized areas (North and South Carolina) affected by hurricanes Matthew (2016) and Harvey (2017). Comparison of movement patterns before, during, and after each hurricane shows that displacement and activity space decreased during the events in the regions. Part of this decline can be potentially tied to observed lower tweet numbers around supply facilities during hurricanes, when many of them are closed, as well as to numerous flooded and blocked roads reported in the affected regions. Furthermore, it is shown that displacement patterns can be modeled through a truncated power-law before, during, and after the analyzed hurricanes, which demonstrates the resilience of human mobility behavior in this regard. Analysis of hashtag use in the three study areas indicates that Twitter contributors post about the events primarily during the hurricane landfall and to some extent also during hurricane preparation. This increase in hurricane-related Twitter topics and decrease in activity space provides a tie between changed travel behavior in affected areas and user perception of hurricanes in the Twitter community. Overall, this study adds to the body of knowledge that connects human mobility to natural crises at the local level. It suggests that governmental and rescue operations need to respond to and be prepared for reduced mobility of residents in affected regions during natural crisis events.
Highlights
Natural crises, such as earthquakes, hurricanes, and floods affect human mobility in the form of evacuation, migration, and return processes [1]
In response to the first two posed objectives of this research, the results showed for three analyzed study regions that (1) displacements become shorter and areas of activity become smaller during hurricanes and that (2) the distribution of displacements can be well approximated by power-law models
The latter finding demonstrates that the Lévy walk model closely resembles human mobility patterns even during hurricane events
Summary
Natural crises, such as earthquakes, hurricanes, and floods affect human mobility in the form of evacuation, migration, and return processes [1]. 1.7 million people who had to be evacuated in the state of Louisiana [2]. In 2017, the floods from Hurricane Harvey around Houston, Texas, displaced more than 30,000 people and inundated hundreds of thousands of homes [4]. Understanding human mobility in times of such events, especially in heavily populated urban areas, is important for support and rescue operations. Twitter is a prominent social networking platform with over 320 million monthly active users worldwide. It allows posting messages, so called tweets, that consist of up to 280 characters
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