Bandana Kar

National Renewable Energy Laboratory | NREL · Energy Security and Resilience Center

In an ever-changing world, where the frequency and intensity of natural and human- made disasters are on the rise, disaster risk reduction has emerged as a crucial focal point of interdisciplinary research, governance, and public discourse. Disaster risk reduction, which aims to safeguard humans and protect environments from hazards and threats, is...

Flooding is a frequent extreme weather event that causes significant financial and societal losses. According to the International Disaster Database (EM-DAT), during January through July 2023, 87 flooding events caused about 2,000 deaths and $13 billion in damages, globally. Among the impacted, lowand medium-income countries with resource scarcity...

The timely restoration of electricity services following extreme weather events is crucial to meet customer energy resilience as well as for the economic and national security of the United States. Electricity restoration plans are needed to monitor multi-state power restoration operations, undertake resource planning, and analyze system vulnerabil...

This report summarizes the focus of the 5 th ACM SIGSPATIAL International Workshop on Advances in Resilient and Intelligent Cities (ARIC 2022 - https://urbands.github.io/ARIC2022/) that was held in-person in Seattle, Washington on November 1, 2022. The attendance for the workshop was 20. The ARIC workshop started in 2017 with an aim to promote the...

This report summarizes the focus of the 4th ACM SIGSPATIAL International Workshop on Advances in Resilient and Intelligent Cities (ARIC 2021 - https://urbands.github.io/ARIC2021/) that was held virtually online on November 2, 2021. The attendance for the workshop was 40. The ARIC workshop started in 2017 with an aim to promote the interdisciplinary...

Findings The increase in the availability of GPS-based movement data has enabled the exploration of mobility patterns in urban transportation networks. Understanding the relationship between social vulnerability and transportation flows from big data during natural disasters is crucial for utilities and policymakers for decision-making purposes, su...

Electric power is essential to the continued functioning of critical assets. During extreme events that compromise electricity infrastructures, liquid fuels and other physical primary energy commodities are used to meet the energy demand of these assets and other dependent critical infrastructures. In 2020, oil and natural gas (ONG) contributed to...

This report presents a roadmap to create an Open Knowledge Network to model real-world complex problems. The roadmap describes the key characteristics of the OKN and essential considerations in developing AI-powered solutions to address these complex problems that face the nation and the world.

An ensemble model for global floodforecasting and alerting to forecast flood severity daily at sub‐watershedlevel globally.

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.2196/30371.].

Flooding is a frequent disaster that has a wide-spread footprint globally with significant financial and societal impacts. With availability of Earth observation data from private and public entities at varying spatial, temporal, and spectral resolution as well as data from crowdsourcing, there is no shortage of models. In fact, models and algorith...

This chapter presents arguments supporting the relevance of remote sensing technologies to disaster resilience and suggests a general workflow for remote sensing-based damage detection (RT-DD) for civil infrastructure assets. Background information on remote (optical) sensing technologies is provided, including their advantages and disadvantages. E...

First version probabilistic and simulation models used to forecast power outage restoration time following tropical storm events.

The ongoing novel coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic has highlighted the need for individuals to have easy access to healthcare facilities for treatment as well as vaccinations. The surge in COVID-19 hospitalizations during 2020 also underscored the fact that accessibility to nearby hospitals for testing and treatment and vaccination sites is crucial...

The Mount Elgon ecosystem (MEE), an important hydrological and socio-economic area in East Africa, has exhibited significant landscape changes. These are driven by both natural factors and human activities. Yet, the vulnerability of this ecosystem is poorly understood. This study characterizes ecological and environmental (eco-environmental) vulner...

We report the findings from two global panel "conversations" that, stimulated by the exceptional coronavirus pandemic of 2020/21, explored the concept of resilience in geographic science teaching and learning. Characteristics of resilient teaching, both in general and with reference to GISc, are listed and shown to be essentially what might in the...

The global COVID-19 pandemic has infected public consciousness with a new appreciation of geospatial analyses in public health. Not since John Snow’s 1854 cholera map of London has a public health crisis brought so much attention to geospatial data, and their importance to understanding, predicting, and preventing the spread of disease. Although hi...

BACKGROUND During the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, social media traffic volume increased exponentially. Previously, Twitter was used as an informational surveillance tool to detect influenza outbreaks and proved to be an efficient and reliable tool. OBJECTIVE The objective of this paper is to spatially examine the association of C...

Background: The Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic exacerbated existing racial/ethnic health disparities in the United States (U.S.). Monitoring nationwide Twitter conversations about COVID-19 and race/ethnicity could shed light on the impact of the pandemic on the racial/ethnic minorities and help address health disparities. Objective:...

The advancements in sensor technology and ubiquity of connected devices has enabled the generation of large volume of disparate, dynamic and geographically distributed data both by scientific communities and citizens. With astonishing technological innovations and convergence, there have been major changes in peoples daily activities and social int...

Urban expansion compounded by climate change appears to exacerbate the temperature difference between urban and rural areas. This temperature difference, known as the urban heat island (UHI) effect, results from lack of vegetation, increased impervious surfaces, excess heat released from human activities, and changing radiation and wind dynamics du...

The rising number of flooding events combined with increased urbanization is contributing to significant economic losses due to damages to structures and infrastructures. From a risk reduction and resilience perspective, it is not only essential to forecast flood risk and potential impacts, but also to disseminate the information to stakeholders on...

Mobility is an indicator of human movement through space and time. With the increasing availability of geolocated data (from GPS, accelerometers, etc.), it is now possible to examine individual as well as group human mobility patterns. Human mobility is influenced by both intrinsic (i.e. personal motivations) and extrinsic (i.e., events like natura...

As replicability and reproducibility (R&R) crises develop within emerging convergent inquiry, ethical use of provenance information is central to the establishment and preservation of trust in critical applications of GIScience and geospatial technologies. Today large volumes of geospatial data are generated at high velocity from satellite sensors...

While Twitter has been touted as a preeminent source of up-to-date information on hazard events, the reliability of tweets is still a concern. Our previous publication extracted relevant tweets containing information about the 2013 Colorado flood event and its impacts. Using the relevant tweets, this research further examined the reliability (accur...

While Twitter has been touted to provide up-to-date information about hazard events, the reliability of tweets is still a concern. Our previous publication extracted relevant tweets containing information about the 2013 Colorado flood event and its impacts. Using the relevant tweets, this research further examined the reliability (accuracy and true...

There has been a significant increase in the severity and frequency of crises and hazards worldwide, which are defined as “an interruption in the reproduction of economic, cultural, social and/or political life (Johnston, R.J. (2002). Dictionary of human geography. (4th ed.). Oxford, UK: Blackwell.)”. While extreme weather events are usually the ca...

Extreme events such as hurricanes cause damages to various infrastructures, including power supply and transportation networks. Restoration of power supply services after extreme events is crucial for disaster response and recovery activities. With damages to transportation and other supply chain networks following extreme events, energy utility co...

The advancements in sensor technology and ubiquity of connected devices has enabled the generation of large volume of disparate, dynamic and geographically distributed data both by scientific communities and citizens. With astonishing technological innovations and convergence, there have been major changes in peoples daily activities and social int...

Understanding how habitat characteristics influence common bottlenose dolphin, Tursiops truncatus, distribution and behavior can be useful for conservation. The dolphin community in Roanoke Sound, North Carolina, primarily exhibits seasonal residency, and there is limited information on their habitat use. The objectives of this study were to increa...

In this study, we analyzed mobility patterns of at-risk populations affected by an extreme event using geotagged tweets to geo-target power restoration efforts. Unlike other studies that have used tweets to facilitate emergency management activities, we used 1.5 million geotagged tweets generated during Hurricane Sandy (2012) to determine the mobil...

The ubiquity of social media data has increased their use during emergency management (EM) in near real-time. For instance, during Haiti Earthquake (2010) and Hurricane Harvey (2017), Ushahidi and Twitter were used respectively for emergency response and rescue operations. Nonetheless, social media data tend to contain [ir]relevant information to b...

Although opportunistic data collected from wildlife ecotours can provide useful information on marine mammal distribution and behavior, concerns exist about whether resultant analyses have diminished accuracy due to spatial bias. To address these concerns, this study compared common bottlenose dolphin (Tursiops truncatus) habitat use results derive...

Although Twitter is used for emergency management activities, the relevance of tweets during a hazard event is still open to debate. In this study, six different computational (i.e. Natural Language Processing) and spatiotemporal analytical approaches were implemented to assess the relevance of risk information extracted from tweets obtained during...

Football is culturally and economically important in the United States, and football stadiums are part of the country's critical infrastructure, thus receiving government protection against hazard events. In this project, an agent-based evacuation model was implemented to optimize evacuation time from The University of Southern Mississippi's M.M. R...

Deep Learning and Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques are transforming a range of sectors from computer vision and natural language processing to autonomous driving and healthcare. In particular, deep learning methods achieve great success in many computer vision problems, such as image classification and object detection. Deep neural networks...

Objective This study examined the role of community resilience and psychological resilience on depressive symptoms in areas on the Mississippi Gulf Coast that have experienced multiple disasters. Methods Survey administration took place in the spring of 2015 to a spatially stratified, random sample of households. This analysis included a total of...

With increased risk and financial impacts from different hazards in recent years, building community resilience through public and private stakeholder participation has become a priority for researchers and policy makers (Cutter et al. 2008; NRC 2012). Risk communication has been identified as a crucial component of community resilience-building ef...

The purpose of this study was to examine relationships among depression, psychological resilience, and other sociodemographic factors of individuals who were highly exposed to Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill in 2010. A spatially stratified random sample of 294 Mississippi Gulf Coast residents living in close proximity...

Risk communication is the exchange of information among stakeholders about an impending disaster and its risks to help individuals take appropriate actions to mitigate hazard impacts. While traditional risk communication follows a command and control structure such that information from hierarchical and vertically integrated organizations is dissem...

The Science and Technology Directorate of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) established the Wireless Emergency Alerts (WEA) Research, Development, Testing, and Evaluation (RDT&E) Program within the First Responders Group’s (FRG) Office for Interoperability and Compatibility (OIC) to facilitate systems research, technology development, testi...

Numerous emergency alert/warning platforms/devices are used to disseminate alert/warning messages encouraging at-risk communities to take actions mitigating adverse effects of a hazard event. Despite technological advances, these platforms/devices are criticized for failure to increase public response to alert/warning messages. Although one compone...

This study investigates the influence of citizens' socio-economic characteristics on the presence of social media in county-level government. E-government is ostensibly citizen-driven and therefore variation in an area's demographics would likely impact a government's utilization of emerging technology, such as social media. Despite its transformat...

A number of emergency warning and alert platforms are used to disseminate warning and alert messages to encourage communities take actions to mitigate adverse impacts of a hazard event. Despite technological advances, these platforms are criticized for their failure to reach at-risk populations. Because socio-economic-cultural factors of at-risk po...

This study examines the concept of electronic government (e-government) inclusiveness and evaluates the inclusiveness of local e-government websites. Inclusiveness sets e-government apart from other types of websites (e.g. commercial or organizational sites) that only serve exclusive market segments. An evaluation for inclusiveness of 101 local gov...

A number of communication platforms including the Integrated Public Alert and Warning System (IPAWS) that require integration of warning platforms, technologies, and stakeholders from both public and private sectors are in place to alert at-risk communities of any hazard and help them take preparatory actions to mitigate hazard impacts. Despite tec...

A number of communication platforms requiring integration of warning platforms, technologies, and public and private sector stakeholders are in place to alert at-risk communities take preparatory actions to mitigate impacts of any disaster. Despite technological advancements, these platforms have been criticized for their failure to reach out the a...

This study proposes to investigate the presence and use of social media, and impact of citizens' demographic factors on social media use and demand in county governments. Despite its transformative potential, e-government growth has been sluggish. Social media is transforming the nature of interaction between individuals and organizations, but its...

Privacy has always been a public concern. It can be dated back to "media privacy" of 1361 that was enacted to protect people from peeping toms in England. In 19th century, privacy became a hot issue with the arrival of modern photography and printing press that enabled easy reporting of personal information and pictures, automated data processing t...

A number of communication platforms requiring integration of warning platforms, technologies, and public and private sector stakeholders are in place to alert at-risk communities take preparatory actions to mitigate impacts of any disaster. Despite technological advancements, these platforms have been criticized for their failure to reach out the a...

Both hierarchical and network based communication platforms are available to alert and warn the at-risk communities of an impending disaster so that they can take preparatory actions to mitigate disaster impacts. Irrespective of the advancements in communication platforms, the success of any alert/warning system depends on the response of recipient...

Technological advancements have led to development of different communication platforms, both hierarchical and network, to provide alert and warning messages to at-risk populations to enable effective and efficient remedial actions be taken by impacted populations. Irrespective of the advancements in communication platforms, the success of any aler...

U.S. Gulf Coast communities face economic and social volatility due to numerous factors, including an increase in hazard impacts, particularly tropical cyclones. Nevertheless, these communities have experienced a dramatic increase in population and property values over time. This research analyzes the vulnerability and resilience of a sample of com...

The Modifiable Areal Unit Problem (MAUP) is the classic term for describing different totals observed from spatially different aggregation units. In a typical analytical problem (e.g. estimating total population within a watershed from census unit totals) the spatial distribution of populations within the census units are modeled. To minimize MAUP...

A number of communication platforms requiring integration of warning platforms, technologies, and public and private sector stakeholders are in place to alert at-risk communities take preparatory actions to mitigate impacts of any disaster. Despite technological advancements, these platforms have been criticized for their failure to reach out the a...

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has identified sports stadiums as part of the nation’s critical infrastructure and potential terrorist targets. Therefore, evacuation planning and simulation have been identified as athletic event security best practices and standards. In this study, a Geographic Information System (GIS) based macro-...

Two geographically related questions with regard to hurricane-induced storm-surge impacts were investigated: (1) What observational scale of analysis is appropriate? (2) Is the effect of observational scale on model results predictable? These two research questions were investigated in the context of storm surge-induced impacts to single-family res...

In the United States, legal steps have been taken to protect personal privacy, which is viewed as an individual's fundamental right. Location privacy (i.e., protection of personal and location information), however, has not received equal attention in the legal system. Given the recent popularity of location-based services (e.g., cell phones), it i...

In the U.S., personal privacy is generally viewed as an individual’s fundamental right. The U.S. Constitution, legislation and case law support this view with regards to government violation of privacy. Protection of personal location information, also known as location privacy, has not received equal attention in the legal systems, although with t...

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has identified sports stadiums as part of the nation’s critical infrastructure and potential terrorist targets. Therefore, evacuation planning and simulation have been identified as athletic event security best practices and standards. In this study, a Geographic Information System (GIS) based macro-si...