Spatiotemporal Information Mining for Emergency Response of Urban Flood Based on Social Media and Remote Sensing Data

Abstract

The emergency response is crucial in preventing and mitigating urban floods. Both remote sensing and social media data offer distinct advantages in large-scale flood monitoring and near-real-time flood monitoring. However, current research lacks a thorough exploration of the application of social media data and remote sensing imagery in the urban flood emergency response. To address this issue, this paper, while extracting disaster information based on social media data, deeply mines the spatiotemporal distribution characteristics and dynamic spatial accessibility of rescue points. Furthermore, SAR imagery and social media data for monitoring urban flooding are compared. This study took the Zhengzhou 7.20 urban flood as a case study and created a methodological framework to quickly extract flood disaster information (flood, landslide, and rescue points) using these two types of data; spatiotemporal analysis and random forest classification were also conducted to mine valuable information. Temporally, the study revealed that disaster information did not increase proportionally with the amount of rainfall during the rainfall process. Spatially, specific regions with higher susceptibility to flooding, landslides, and rescue points were identified, such as the central region characterized by low drainage standards and high-density urban areas, as well as the eastern region with low-lying terrain. Moreover, this study examined the spatial accessibility of rescue resources in real flood scenarios and found that their service coverage varied throughout the day during and after the disaster. In addition, social media excelled in high-density urban areas’ flood point extraction, while SAR performed better in monitoring floods at the edges of low-density urban areas and large water bodies, allowing them to complement each other, to a certain extent. The findings of this study provide scientific reference value for the optimal selection of rescue paths and the allocation of resources in the emergency response to urban floods caused by extreme rainstorms.