A worldwide analysis of human exposure to floods by using satellite nighttime lights
Event details
| Date | 19.05.2015 |
| Hour | 16:15 › 17:15 |
| Speaker | Dr Serena Ceola, DICAM, Università degli Studi di Bologna, IT |
| Location | |
| Category | Conferences - Seminars |
Abstract:
River floods claim thousands of lives and severe economic damages every year, but effective and high-resolution methods to map the spatio-temporal evolution of human proximity to rivers and thus human exposure to floods at the global scale are still lacking. This talk will present an innovative approach to worldwide assess human exposure to floods at a fine spatial resolution by using nightlight data. Nightlights have been widely employed as a proxy for population and settlement density, economic activity, electric power consumption and distribution, poverty and development status, as well as for addressing other environmental issues, such as light pollution. Herein, nightlight data will be associated to the river network geographical position to locate the areas subjected to flood exposure. The analysis, performed at the global, continental and country scales, will allow the identification of the temporal evolution of nightlights along streams and rivers, as well as in their immediate proximity, from 1992 to 2013. Moreover, global data of economic losses caused by flooding events will be correlated to nighttime lights to show that increasing nightlights are associated to flood damage intensification.
Short biography:
Serena Ceola obtained her Master Degree in Environmental Engineering in 2009 at the University of Padova. Then she moved to Lausanne and got a PhD in Environment at the Doctoral School in Civil and Environmental Engineering at EPFL in November 2013, with a thesis entitled "Hydrologic drivers and controls of stream ecological processes". In 2013, she moved to the University of Bologna as Postdoctoral Researcher, and since November 2014, she became a Research Fellow. Overall, her research interests deal with hydrological processes related to ecological and human activities both on a local and on a basin-scale perspective. So far, her research activity has been mainly focused on river flow dynamics, being one of the main controls of fluvial ecosystem processes, and on flood risk assessment.
River floods claim thousands of lives and severe economic damages every year, but effective and high-resolution methods to map the spatio-temporal evolution of human proximity to rivers and thus human exposure to floods at the global scale are still lacking. This talk will present an innovative approach to worldwide assess human exposure to floods at a fine spatial resolution by using nightlight data. Nightlights have been widely employed as a proxy for population and settlement density, economic activity, electric power consumption and distribution, poverty and development status, as well as for addressing other environmental issues, such as light pollution. Herein, nightlight data will be associated to the river network geographical position to locate the areas subjected to flood exposure. The analysis, performed at the global, continental and country scales, will allow the identification of the temporal evolution of nightlights along streams and rivers, as well as in their immediate proximity, from 1992 to 2013. Moreover, global data of economic losses caused by flooding events will be correlated to nighttime lights to show that increasing nightlights are associated to flood damage intensification.
Short biography:
Serena Ceola obtained her Master Degree in Environmental Engineering in 2009 at the University of Padova. Then she moved to Lausanne and got a PhD in Environment at the Doctoral School in Civil and Environmental Engineering at EPFL in November 2013, with a thesis entitled "Hydrologic drivers and controls of stream ecological processes". In 2013, she moved to the University of Bologna as Postdoctoral Researcher, and since November 2014, she became a Research Fellow. Overall, her research interests deal with hydrological processes related to ecological and human activities both on a local and on a basin-scale perspective. So far, her research activity has been mainly focused on river flow dynamics, being one of the main controls of fluvial ecosystem processes, and on flood risk assessment.
Practical information
- General public
- Free
- This event is internal
Organizer
- IIE - EESS
Contact
- Prof. Andrea Rinaldo, ECHO