580 / 2019-03-01 01:18:59

Quantifying natural hazards' perturbation on human mobility for returners and explorers: A case study of Typhoon Mangkhut

perturbation,human mobility,returner,explorer,case study

全体主题 > Spatial data collection, Analysis, and Visualization

The mobility patterns of urban population, which are known to bear significant regularity, could be largely affected by extreme weather events, reflecting the perturbation of such events to people’s daily life. In this study, we investigated the influence of the 2018 Typhoon Mangkhut on the mobility pattern of urban population in the City of Guangzhou, by analyzing the trajectories of over 75 thousand anonymous individuals in the city before and during the typhoon. We found that information extracted from these individuals’ most visited locations during normal days was not sufficient to support accurate prediction of their mobility pattern during the two-day typhoon event. We further classified all individuals as returners or explorers, based on the strength of correlation between their recurrent mobility and overall mobility. The trajectories of the two groups showed that returners’ mobility pattern was more severely affected by the typhoon than explorers, and the difference between the two groups became less distinctive under the impact of the typhoon. The findings of this study contribute to the existing literature by advancing the knowledge on human mobility patterns under the impact of natural hazards, which would be valuable for predicting mobility pattern of urban population under similar extreme events and enabling informed emergency management decisions and resilient urban planning.