Figure - available from: Environmental Research: Infrastructure and Sustainability
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Maps show distribution of outages (at USNG cell level) recorded by GridMetrics (left) and estimated by our NTL-based method (right) in the Houston Metro Area on 16 February 2021. Since GridMetrics’ coverage is limited to 4297 USNG cells spread over 8 counties in the Houston Metro Area, we display the NTL-detected results (right map) only for those 4297 USNG cells to facilitate consistent comparison between true (left map) and predicted (right map) values. Red color denotes USNG cells with outage, blue denotes USNG cells without outage, and gray color represents areas that were not covered by GridMetrics. Table at the bottom shows a confusion matrix that provides the percentage of USNG cells (in)correctly predicted as experiencing an outage (or not) by our NTL-based approach in comparison to the ground truth recorded by GridMetrics. Numbers provided in brackets provide the absolute number of USNG cells. A Jaccard index (intersection-over-union) of 0.67 and F1-score of 0.8 indicate strong agreement between the GridMetrics-reported and the NTL-based outage estimates.
Source publication
Climate change induced extreme weather events will increase in intensity and frequency, leading to longer and widespread electricity outages. As an example, Winter Storm Uri in Texas left over 4.5 million customers without power between 14 and 18 February, 2021. The social justice consequences of these events remain an outstanding question, as outa...
Citations
... Using surveys and interviews, researchers have studied the resilience of water infrastructures [11], household preparedness [12], and social disparities in power and water outages [13,14]. Using nighttime light images, researchers have identified the geographic areas and neighborhoods that suffered from power outages and analyzed related inequity issues [4,15,16]. Using social media data, researchers have developed methods to assess damages caused by the winter storm [17], and have examined disaster communications by authorities and their interactions with the public [18,19]. ...
Winter Storm Uri slammed Texas between February 13-17, 2021 and caused widespread power outages. Understanding the impacts of this catastrophic event on local communities has important meaning. In this study, we examine the impacts of this winter storm and its impact disparities on different population groups over three stages of this disaster: the initial-hit stage, power-outage stage, and recovery stage. The study focuses on Harris County, Texas which was severely affected by the winter storm. We leverage home-dwelling time information from anonymized mobile phone location data to study the constrained mobility of people due to the winter storm as a way to quantify its impacts on local communities. Considering that mobile phone location data may be affected by the power outages, we further integrate nighttime light (NTL) images into our analyses to assess disaster impacts during the power-outage stage, and use home-dwelling time to assess the impacts during the other two stages (i.e., the initial-hit stage and recovery stage). The results reveal disparate impacts of this winter storm on local communities in the three stages of this disaster. We also find impact disparities on population groups with different socioeconomic and demographic backgrounds, especially during the initial-hit stage. These results help us better understand the impacts of this catastrophic event, and could inform future response and mitigation efforts in identifying vulnerable communities, allocating resources, and curtailing negative impacts of similar disasters.
... Using surveys and interviews, researchers have studied the resilience of water infrastructures [11], household preparedness [12], and social disparities in power and water outages [13,14]. Using nighttime light images, researchers have identified the geographic areas and neighborhoods that suffered from power outages and analyzed related inequity issues [4,15,16]. Using social media data, researchers have developed methods to assess damages caused by the winter storm [17], and have examined disaster communications by authorities and their interactions with the public [18,19]. ...
... For the time period of this study, we examine three stages of this winter storm, which are: initial-hit stage (February 13-14), power-outage stage (February [15][16][17][18], and recovery stage (February 19-28). These three stages are determined based on the overall duration of the winter storm in Harris County as documented by NOAA [41] and the county-level power outage data obtained from PowerOutage.us. ...
