Enhancing Community Resilience, Flood Risk Assessment, and Decision-Making in the Face of Extreme Weather Events

Recent catastrophic storms and flood events—including Hurricanes Helene and Milton (2024), Ian (2022) in the United States, and severe floods in Valencia, Spain (2024), Belgium, and Germany (2021)—highlight the critical need for comprehensive resilience planning in coastal and riverine communities. With a global rise in both the frequency and severity of weather and climate disasters, coastal regions are increasingly vulnerable, facing significant risks and economic losses. This work presents an integrated framework to support flood resilience and optimize evacuation strategies by leveraging big data, high-resolution flood and storm surge models, and advanced predictive tools. This framework combines high-resolution computational fluid dynamics and finite element models to evaluate flood damage and structural vulnerability under different hurricane intensities. By capturing both aleatory and epistemic uncertainties in hazard assessment, building resilience, and community preparedness, it provides a robust basis for proactive flood risk management. The framework also includes a multidimensional flood-damage assessment model, which goes beyond traditional depth–damage relationships by incorporating building-specific factors such as height, age, configuration, and construction material. Structural resilience is calculated as a function of recovery time, community preparedness, and the severity of flood-induced damage, thus enabling a detailed, community-scale risk assessment. Validated through large-scale storm surge and 2D inundation simulations, this framework offers actionable insights for emergency managers, policymakers, and local stakeholders. By integrating hydrodynamics, structural data, and socio-economic factors, this comprehensive approach empowers communities with data-driven resources for making informed decisions to reduce risk and improve adaptive capacity. This framework is positioned to be highly impactful for diverse users—including property owners, insurance companies, real estate businesses, and regional decision-makers—as it addresses the complex challenges of flood resilience in the face of increasing extreme weather events.