Wanyun Shao, Ph.D
  • Home
  • News
  • Bio
  • Research
  • Publications
  • Public Writing
  • Blog
  • Teaching
  • Reading
  • Contact
  • Links

Our new paper in Science of the Total Environment

7/19/2020

1 Comment

 
Picture

    Our new paper has been published in Science of the Total Environment (Impact Factor: 6.551). Below please find the abstract:

     "Climate extremes will be intensified and become more frequent. One of the regions where this is the case is the U.S. Gulf coast region. This region is susceptible to the impacts of climate extremes. This region has recently experienced large amounts of economic damages caused by high-impact hurricanes and floods. Meanwhile, drought can also pose serious risks once it occurs. By using a 2019 U.S. Gulf Coast survey combined with Standard Precipitation Index, we closely examined retrospective and prospective evaluations of drought and flood among coastal residents. Drawing upon literature on human-environment system, we were interested in how the objective conditions of past drought and flood influenced individual’s perceptions of these hazards and how their retrospective evaluations were correlated with their prospective evaluations of future trends of these hazards. Coastal residents’ retrospective evaluations of past drought and flood were found to be influenced by historic objective conditions. Higher drought frequencies were found to increase the probability of perceiving increasing trend of drought number in the past. Higher flood frequencies were found to decrease the probability of perceiving increasing trend of flood number in the past. Higher intensities of drought and flood were found to increase the probabilities of perceiving increasing trends of drought duration and flood amount in the past. Coastal residents’ prospective evaluations of future drought and flood were found to be influenced by retrospective evaluations of these hazards, suggesting the temporal continuity in human judgement. Moreover, those who relied on a longer time span in reference to the future were found to be more likely to perceive increasing trends of drought and flood. We ended this paper by proposing a theoretical framework to guide future studies and discussing policy implications."​
Picture
Core Figure - Figure 4. Retrospective evaluations of drought and flood risk and association with objective conditions (a) and their correlations with prospective evaluations of drought and flood risk (b). In (a), filled circles, circles with cross, empty circles depict the frequency, duration, intensity, respectively, of drought (red) and flood (blue). In (b) filled (empty) circles depict retrospective evaluations on past drought and flood numbers (past drought duration and past flood amount). The bars represent confidence intervals of all the estimated coefficients (Shao and Kam, 2020)
Picture
Graphic Abstract
Picture
Figure 2. Number of states under regional drought events (red) and regional pluvial flood events (blue) (Shao and Kam, 2020)
Picture
Figure 3: Monthly time series of the relative search activity indices on drought (a) and flood (b) between 2004 through 2018. Dark (light) lines depict the averages (maximum and minimum values) of the relative search activity indices over the five Gulf costal states (Shao and Kam, 2020)
1 Comment

A new paper in Palgrave Communications

8/20/2019

0 Comments

 
Picture

       In a new paper, we used Google Trends to reveal the spatiotemporal patterns of US drought awareness. This paper has been published in Palgrave Communications (a Nature journal, now Humanities and Social Sciences Communications). Here is more information about this paper:


Article Title: Spatiotemporal Patterns of US Drought Awareness

Summary:
Drought is a creeping climatological phenomenon with persistent precipitation deficits. The intangible and gradual characteristics of drought cause a lack of social response during the onset. The level of awareness of a local drought increases rapidly through mass media reports and online information searching activities when the drought reaches its peak severity. This high level of local drought awareness drives concerns for water shortage and support for water policy. However, spatiotemporal patterns of national-scale drought awareness have never been studied due to constraints imposed by time-consuming and costly survey data collection and surveys' limited sample sizes.
Here, we present the national-scale study to reveal the spatiotemporal patterns of drought awareness over the contiguous United States (CONUS) using Google Trends data and an advanced statistical technique, Principal Component Analysis (PCA). Results show that the first two PC modes can explain 48% (38% for PC1 and 10% for PC2; see Figures below) of the total variance of state-level drought awareness. We find that the PC1 mode relates to a national pattern of drought awareness across the CONUS. The spatiotemporal patterns further imply that residents in the Northeastern US region are the most aware of the emergence of drought, regardless of the geographic location of the occurrence. The results illustrate how search engine queries and social media data can help develop an effective and efficient plan for drought mitigation in the future.

         The following Figure comes from Kim et al. (2019):
Picture
Figure 1: Major principle components of state-level drought awareness and state-level drought risk over the contiguous United States. Temporal correlations of Drought Awareness from the first two major modes with individual state-level drought awareness ((c) and (d), respectively) and individual state-level drought risk ((e) and (f), respectively). White colored states depict the states with insignificant temporal correlation at the 99% confident level.
Picture
Figure 2: State-level correlation analysis of drought awareness and drought risk. Colors in the grid cells depict temporal correlation coefficients of state-level drought awareness (left triangle) and state-level drought risk (right triangle) of one state with those of the rest 48 states. To assist interpretation, areas that depict interstate relationships within the region (green colored boundaries) and across regions (blue colored boundaries) are shown in the legend box at upper-left corner.
0 Comments
    Picture
    湖边的风


    Wanyun Shao, Ph.D

    I am a geographer who studies the relationship between human society and the environment at various geographic levels. I apply both quantitative (i.e., statistics and geospatial models) and qualitative (i.e., in-person interviews and policy analysis) methods in my research.

    Subscribe to Newsletter

    Categories

    All
    Climate Change
    Coastal Issues
    Community Resilience
    COVID 19
    COVID-19
    Drought
    Energy
    Environmental Policy
    Flooding
    Geography
    GIS
    Hurricanes
    Natural Disaster
    Other
    Paris Accord
    Public Health
    Reading
    Risk Analysis
    Science
    Sea Level Rise
    Weather And Climate

    Archives

    February 2021
    December 2020
    October 2020
    July 2020
    December 2019
    October 2019
    September 2019
    August 2019
    June 2019
    April 2019
    March 2019
    February 2019
    December 2018
    November 2018
    October 2018
    September 2018
    August 2018
    July 2018
    June 2018
    May 2018
    April 2018
    March 2018
    January 2018
    December 2017
    November 2017
    October 2017
    September 2017
    August 2017
    July 2017
    June 2017
    May 2017
    April 2017
    March 2017
    January 2017
    December 2016
    November 2016
    October 2016
    September 2016
    August 2016

    View my profile on LinkedIn

    RSS Feed

Proudly powered by Weebly