Could social media data aid in disaster response and damage assessment? Countries face both an increasing frequency and an increasing intensity of natural disasters resulting from climate change. During such events, citizens turn to social media platforms for disaster-related communication and information. Social media improves situational awareness, facilitates dissemination of emergency infor...

This study appraises New Orleans soil lead and children's lead exposure before and ten years after Hurricane Katrina flooded the city. Introduction: Early childhood exposure to lead is associated with lifelong and multiple health, learning, and behavioral disorders. Lead exposure is an important factor hindering the long-term resilience and sustainability of communities. Lead exposure dispropor...

We find that long-period variations in tropical cyclone and hurricane frequency over the past century in the North Atlantic Ocean have occurred as three relatively stable regimes separated by sharp transitions. Each regime has seen 50% more cyclones and hurricanes than the previous regime and is associated with a distinct range of sea surface temperatures (SSTs) in the eastern Atlantic Ocean. O...

This study assesses the impact of imperfect sampling in the presatellite era (between 1878 and 1965) on North Atlantic hurricane activity measures and on the long-term trends in those measures. The results indicate that a substantial upward adjustment of hurricane counts may be needed prior to 1965 to account for likely ‘‘missed’’ hurricanes due to sparse density of reporting ship traffic. Afte...

This paper describes a novel method for hurricane trajectory prediction based on data mining (HTPDM) according to the hurricane’s motion characteristics. Firstly, all frequent trajectories in the historical hurricane trajectory database are mined by using association analysis technology and their corresponding association rules are generated as motion patterns. Then, the current hurricane traje...

To better understand household hurricane evacuation decisions, this paper addresses a limitation to existing hurricane evacuation modeling aspects by developing a dynamic model of hurricane evacuation behavior. A household’s evacuation decision is framed as an optimal stopping problem where every potential evacuation time period prior to the actual hurricane landfall, the household’s optimal ch...

INTRODUCTION Millions of vulnerable, elderly individuals live in coastal areas susceptible to hurricanes and are at risk for adverse health outcomes. The purpose of this study was to determine the status of preparedness for and possible health consequences of a hurricane on a vulnerable, but experienced, elderly population. PROBLEM Preparedness guidelines have been published, but it is unclea...

SENKBEIL, J.C. and SHERIDAN, S.C., 2006. A postlandfall hurricane classification system for the United States. Journal of Coastal Research, 22(5), 1025–1034. West Palm Beach (Florida), ISSN 0749-0208. The Saffir–Simpson scale is useful for evaluating maximum sustained hurricane winds and storm surge over open water in the prelandfall window, but it fails to accurately account for the observed i...

On October 29, 2012, Hurricane Sandy struck the U.S. northeast and mid-Atlantic seaboard; the effects of the storm extended to southeastern and midwestern states and to eastern Canada. At the time, 1,899 residents in the most affected areas were undergoing treatment for tuberculosis (TB) disease or infection. To ascertain the operational abilities of state and local TB programs during and after...