Information-seeking on the Web can predict flood outcomes

What is it about?

People use Internet as the main information reference for various purposes. Web analytics services, like Google Analytics, provide website traffic reports, which traditionally have been used to optimize web interaction experience. In this study we analyze how patterns of human traffic on the Environment Agency Flood App webpages relates to the real weather events and can be used to predict the flood outcomes

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Why is it important?

This is the first study proposing a method to account for active human behaviour in the hazard risk modeling. Traditional weather-related risk estimation routines have been predominantly geocentric and treat exposed populations as passive agents. Emergence of the new large behavioural datasets gradually opens up opportunities for novel research directions towards more socially-adapted risk estimation, forecast and communication