Wayfinding and Accessibility Analysis for Critical Amenities in Iowa During Flood Events

Abstract

Transportation infrastructure plays an essential role in flood response and recovery. However, flooding may disturb road functionality and generate direct and indirect adverse impacts, including the loss of access to essential services. This paper presents a comprehensive analysis of flood impacts on road network topology and accessibility to amenities for major communities in the State of Iowa using graph-theoretic methods, including single-source shortest path analyses. We assessed the disruption of transportation networks on the accessibility to critical amenities (e.g., hospitals) under 100 and 500-year flood scenarios. Our analysis methodology leads toward the development of an integrated real-time decision support system that will allow decision-makers to explore “what if” flood scenarios to identify vulnerable areas and population in their authority. Due to locations and effects on road topology under flood events, the results show differential impacts in access to critical services.

An Immersive Hydroinformatics Framework with Extended Reality for Enhanced Visualization and Simulation of Hydrologic Data

“…In the realm of environmental management and planning, hydrological data plays a pivotal role in supporting intricate decision-making processes, with a pronounced emphasis on the social dimensions of water resource management (Xu et al, 2022). This emphasis is rooted in the imperative need for decisions regarding water resources to align with the understanding, consent, and endorsement of local stakeholders, encompassing water managers, landowners, and residents (Alabbad et al, 2024). Given this critical focus on comprehension and stakeholder engagement, effective representation of data assumes paramount significance in this field (Carson et al, 2018).…”