How can flood data be more useful?

Abstract:

Flooding is a natural hazard that affects millions of people throughout the world every year. Fatalities from flooding occur disproportionately in developing countries, where difficulties in relief efforts are compounded by lack of information about flood and settlement patterns. Yet, an ever-increasing amount of flood data is being produced by a variety of organisations to coordinate flood responses in the field. Developing appropriate forms of flood data presentation, including maps, is a challenge because users of this data are diverse, ranging from global NGOs to under resourced grassroots NGOs. These organisations have diverse cultural, bureaucratic and technological practices. Preferred methods for visually presenting data and linguistic/semantic questions around risk are also likely to vary. Historically, the humanitarian sector has had to use poor quality data, which adds on the challenge of communicating uncertainties
In this work, we will demonstrate how a collaboration between physical scientists, social scientists, cartographers and linguists has been able to characterise the needs of flood data users. Through a series of interviews, an online survey with an innovative mapping component and focus groups, we engaged with a wide-range of stakeholders and users across varying disciplines and organisations based around the globe. Here, we present our initial findings which will offer guidelines for flood data producers, enabling them to make their products more useful.