Modelling spatiotemporal dynamics of population, flooding and road travel for enhanced risk assessment: a case study of York, UK

Abstract

The number of people travelling around an urban area varies greatly throughout the course of a day, week or year. As a result, the daily timing of a flood event, relative to these mobility patterns, is a critical factor in how a flood affects the local population. However, population mobility is seldom considered in flood risk assessments, meaning an important aspect of risk is missed. This thesis aims to investigate how daily variation in the travelling population, pluvial flood onset timing, and pluvial flood magnitude, interact to cause spatial and temporal variation in disruption to journey times and destination disruption across the urban area of York, UK. The population has been considered in subgroups, aligned to age and economic activity characteristics as these have been shown to have distinctive temporal characteristics. In each chapter, commuters and/or primary school children are the population groups selected as exemplars for analysis. This thesis comprises three analysis chapters. The first analysis chapter’s goal was to develop a framework for combining spatiotemporal population flow data with GIS network analysis, using journeys to primary schools as an example. The second analysis chapter examined how estimated flood-related commuter travel disruption was affected by different approaches to spatiotemporal population modelling. The third analysis chapter’s goal was to assess if the time of flood onset is more important than flood magnitude for disrupting commuter and school travel in York. Overall, this thesis has provided evidence that for sudden onset flooding scenarios, timing of flood onset is a greater determinant of hazard-related travel disruption than flood magnitude. The semidynamic framework could be applied to other urban areas to model the effects of pluvial flood events, as it works at the scale of a local authority, and to other types of hazard which disrupt travel like landslides, earthquakes and fallen trees.

More information

Identifiers

ORCID for Jim Wright: orcid.org/0000-0002-8842-2181

Catalogue record

Export record