Quantitative estimates of collective geo-tagged human activities in response to typhoon Hato using location-aware big data

Abstract

Location-aware big data from social media have been widely used to quantitatively characterize natural disasters and disaster-induced losses. It is not clear how human activities collectively respond to a disaster. In this study, we examined the collective human activities in response to Typhoon Hato at multi spatial scales using aggregated location request data. We proposed a Multilevel Abrupt Changes Detection (MACD) methodological framework to detect and characterize the abrupt changes in location requests in response to Typhoon Hato. Results show that, at the grid level, most anomaly grids were located within a radius of 53 km around the typhoon trajectory. At the city level, there are significant spatial difference in terms of the human activity recovery duration (230 h on average). At the subnational level, the absolute magnitude of abrupt location request changes is strongly correlated with the typhoon-induced economic losses and the population affected.

Keywords

• human response
• typhoon
• natural disaster
• location-aware data
• rapid disaster assessment