Astrophysical science at the service of flood prevention

Aug. 1 () –

Astronomical skills to detect supernovae and spiral galaxies will soon be used in disaster relief efforts help humanitarian workers in Sudan.

The northeast African country suffers from recurring floods that have killed hundreds of people and displaced thousands more in recent years, leaving them homeless and with little or no food.

Scientists at the Lancaster University are now preparing to launch a new project, which has emerged from a citizen science platform, to help humanitarian workers avoid flooded areas when delivering supplies in Sudan.

Astrophysicist Brooke Simmons has led humanitarian and disaster relief efforts on the citizen science platform Zooniverse since 2014, after realizing that the skills needed to identify a new supernova are the same as those required to detect the features that are most important to responders and decision makers, such as roadblocks and structural damage.

Zoouniverse offers the public the opportunity to help by identifying patterns in Data sets that are too large for experts to examine on their own and too complex for computer algorithms and AI to reliably label.

“Humans are very good at spotting things like complex spiral patterns in galaxies, or which of the changes between nighttime images of the same part of the sky have an actual exploding star, amidst any of the other things that can change, like a satellite passing overhead or a random cosmic ray hitting the detector,” he said. it’s a statement Dr Simmons, who presented her work at the annual meeting of the UK’s Royal Astronomical Society (RAS).

“Crisis mapping ignores changes like debris in a field that’s not near a building or road, and only flags things that first responders need to know about. The details are different, but the fundamental task is the same as in our astrophysics citizen science projects, or Zooniverse projects in other fields of research.”

Now those same skills are being used to help create a map of road and river crossings in Sudan, where the road network is crisscrossed by riverbeds that flood during the rainy season.

It is very difficult to predict which river channels will flood on any given day during the rainy season, meaning that aid workers too often have to abort a trip to deliver aid, wasting time and resources.

“Our first task in this project is to create a very complete map of the road and river crossings in Sudan. We know where the roads are, but the river map is incomplete, so we are asking for volunteers to mark the crossings and measure the length of the paths that are crossed by river channels,” Simmons said.

“This will help aid workers assess the severity of future flooding throughout the area they are trying to deliver aid to. That task in itself will be invaluable to aid workers. Once the rainy season begins this year, we hope to use the road and river map to identify areas where we can focus monitoring efforts.”

“The plan is to continue the project by asking volunteers to periodically review the new images available and see if we can quickly identify new flooding in time for help humanitarian workers on the ground plan their travel routes.”