Creating effective flood mitigation policies

Optimal Flood Mitigation over Flood Propagation Approximations

Globally, flooding is the most frequent among all natural disasters, commonly resulting in damage to infrastructure, economic catastrophe, and loss of life. Since the flow of water is influenced by the shape and height of topography, an effective mechanism for preventing and directing floods is to use structures that increase height, e.g., levees and sandbags. In this paper, we introduce the Op...

Flood Characteristics and Mitigation Issues

Among various natural disasters floods make the largest impact in terms of number of casualties, people affected and property lost. Flood data during the past 30 years show that flood events that cause significant impacts have increased at a steady rate. Available data suggest that this increase could be attributed to increasing population and exposure, increasing property values located in vul...

Involving Homeowners in Flood Mitigation

Early efforts to mitigate flood hazards emphasized structural solutions such as dams and levees. More recent strategies have stressed regulatory, nonstructural measures. In neither case, however, has homeowner involvement been given a very important role. Frustrated with the limited success of past efforts, floodplain managers recently have become more interested in encouraging homeowners to ta...

Effective Data Skew Mitigation

The production of data is expanding at an astonishing pace. The dramatic rise of unstructured data like photos, videos and social media has ushered in a new breed of non-relational databases and which are termed as “Big Data”. In 2012, the amount of information stored worldwide exceeded 2.8 Zetabytes. By 2020, the total amount of data stored is expected to be 50 times larger than today. Big Dat...

Creating Effective Pay Systems