Natural disasters such as cyclones, droughts and floods, are becoming increasingly frequent and severe as a result of changing climate. In the past twenty years, disasters cost more than $2 trillion, killed over 1.3 million and affected more than 4.4 billion people. However, the effects are disproportionate. A high number of women, children and people in poverty were the most impacted but we don’t fully understand these vulnerabilities until it is too late.
This is why we created PopRisk to combine disaster data with social vulnerability data to create visual and statistical actionable insights into populations who are most at risk.

This is why we created PopRisk to combine disaster data with social vulnerability data to create visual and statistical actionable insights into populations who are most at risk.
We developed a web app using .Net, and Mapbox JS to create map styles and layers to display multiple datasets.

The hazard layers on the map include the location of active fires over the past 48 hours from MODIS, near real-time earthquake alerts from USGS, and landslide susceptibility from NASA’s Global Landslide model.

Our unique solution to the problem was using social vulnerability index from CDC for the US which is calculated using data on socioeconomic status, disabilities, minority status, access to transport and a lot more. We will use this data to find specific population groups by age, gender, and income who are most affected by a specific environmental disaster. We would also like to send out email alerts with this information to relevant humanitarian organizations and government officials responsible for the affected region.
In the future, we hope to visualize forecasts of hazards and affected populations so we can mitigate hazards before they become a disaster.

Github repository: https://github.com/VirajSanghvi1/SpaceApps2019

Environmental and Health Hazards

1. USGS FEWS for drought monitoring: https://earlywarning.usgs.gov/fews
2. NASA Global Landslide Viewer: https://pmm.nasa.gov/applications/global-landslide-model
3. Global drought monitoring system: https://www.drought.gov/gdm/current-conditions
4. Drought monitoring for US: https://www.drought.gov/drought/data-maps-tools/current-conditions
5. Drought Monitoring shapefiles: https://droughtmonitor.unl.edu/Data/GISData.aspx
6. Active Fires 48h web map service from NASA FIIRMS: https://firms.modaps.eosdis.nasa.gov/web-services/
7. USGS web service for near real-time earthquakes: https://earthquake.usgs.gov/fdsnws/event/1/
8. Healthmap for disease outbreaks: https://healthmap.org/en/

Social Vulnerability Datasets

1. US Social Vulnerability map CDC: https://svi.cdc.gov/map.html
2. Statewise Social vulnerability shapefiles: https://coast.noaa.gov/digitalcoast/data/sovi.html
3. NASA SEDAC global population estimates: https://sedac.ciesin.columbia.edu/data/set/gpw-v4-population-count-rev11/data-download
4. SVI CDC data document: https://svi.cdc.gov/Documents/Data/2016_SVI_Data/SVI2016Documentation.pdf
5. Small area income poverty estimates API: https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/saipe/data/api.html