Challenges and Opportunities of Using Big Data for Assessing Flood Risks

Among the various natural calamities, flood is considered one of the most catastrophic natural hazards, which has disastrous impact on the socioeconomic lifeline of a country. Nowadays, business organizations are using Big Data to improve their strategies and operations for revealing patterns and market trends to increase revenues. Eventually, the crisis response teams of a country have turned their interest to explore the potentialities of Big Data in managing disaster risks such as flooding. The reason for this is that during flooding, crisis response teams need to take decisions based on the huge amount of incomplete and inaccurate information, which are mainly coming from three major sources, including people, machines, and organizations. Hence, Big Data technologies can be used to monitor and to determine the people exposed to the risks of flooding in real time. This could be achieved by analyzing and processing sensor data streams coming from various sources as well as data collected from other sources such as Twitter, Facebook, and satellite and also from disaster organizations of a country by using Big Data technologies. Therefore, this chapter explores the challenges, the opportunities, and the methods, required to leverage the potentiality of Big Data to assess and predict the risk of flooding.