This one year researcher position takes place in the context of the ANR PICS (Toward Integrated Nowcasting of Flash Flood Impacts) project and will contribute to a recent collaboration between social scientist and hydro-meteorologists at IGE and agent-based modelling scientists from LIG (Laboratoire d’Informatique de Grenoble) (Adam et al., 2016a). This collaboration aims at improving our knowledge on how social vulnerability related to short-fuse weather hazards can be integrated in prediction tools of flash flood risks.
IGE built a concept of dynamic vulnerability and identified the main processes, and their relevant spatio-temporal scales, associated with flash-flood hazards and social vulnerability. These processes need to be jointly captured to forecast human impacts associated with short-fuse weather events. Based on this theoretical approach, they proposed a model to dynamically map human risk predictions based on the vehicle related incidents and the time-variant exposure during one flash-flood event (Shabou et al., 2017, Ruin et al., 2019). This model simplified social factors due to the spatio-temporal scales of the census data used; moreover, only one impact (i.e. vehicle related incident) was taken into account. Meanwhile, work at LIG has looked at the role of social attachment to people, places and objects in crisis situations (Bañgate et al., 2017) and in developing agent-based models of human behaviour in the pre- and post- crisis phase (Adam et al. 2016b).
The proposed Postdoc position pursues this line of research and aims at improving our understanding of the processes leading to human impacts with respect to short-fuse extreme weather events (i.e. flash-flood). The main challenge is to point out how the coupling of external factors (hydro-meteorological and social circumstances) and social- cognitive and behavioural factors intervene in shaping human impacts during such events.
To reach this objective, we propose to build a generic agent-based model of human behaviour in flash-floods. This model will be adapted from the existing model developed at LIG (Adam et al. 2016a) and the MobRISK discrete event simulator built at IGE (Shabou et al., 2017), by the introduction of theoretical concepts related to human vulnerability to short-fuse weather events. The main interest of this modelling approach is to be able to capture small space and time scales and thus to better describe social processes. We will thus test the effect of several hypotheses dedicated to risk mitigation.
This generic model will be tested on specific case studies in Southern France identified in the context of the PICS project.
Research in Hydrological risk assessment: signature of human behavior on the impact associated with extreme rainfall events.
The Institut des Géosciences de l’Environnement (IGE) is a public research laboratory under the supervision of CNRS/INSU, IRD, Grenoble Alpes University (UGA) and Grenoble-INP.
It brings together about 240 people, including 145 permanent members (researchers, teacher-researchers, engineers) and about 95 doctoral students, post-doctoral fellows and staff on fixed-term contracts. The laboratory also welcomes several dozen trainees and scientific visitors every year. The laboratory is located on three sites of the Grenoble University Campus (Molière, OSUG-B, and Bergès sites).
The IGE is one of the main laboratories of the Observatoire des Sciences de l’Univers de Grenoble (OSUG) which is a federative structure of the INSU.
The selected person will carry out his/her mission within the HMCIS team of the IGE and will be placed under the responsibility of Isabelle RUIN, CNRS researcher, coordinator of WP3 of the PICS Project.
