Postdoc position - Hydrological risk assessment: signature of human behavior on the impact associat

SCIENTIFIC HOSTING DEPARTMENT (LABORATORY’S NAME):  LIG

SUPERVISOR’S NAME: Carole Adam (LIG) – Sandrine Anquetin (IGE)

CONTACT: Carole Adam, carole.adam@imag.fr; Sandrine Anquetin, Sandrine.anquetin@univ-grenoble-alpes.fr
 
 

JOB PROFILE (Description):

This one year Postdoc position takes place within an emerging collaboration with agent- based modelling scientists at LIG (Adam et al., 2016a) and socio-hydrologists at IGE (Lutoff et al., 2017). This collaboration aims at improving our knowledge on how social vulnerability related to short-fuse weather hazards can be represented in risk management prediction tool.
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. This model, built at the continental scale (here the whole USA), 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), 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 where data is available to validate the model; the case studies will be determined during the project, based on availability of the required data (census, GIS, human schedules, etc). Possible case studies include: Texas, for which observation data is available (e.g. number of fatalities; incidents; phone call; social networks data); and the Lebanese urbanized littoral area prone to flash-flood for which ISTerre has built a long-term partnership with the CNRS-L, which has gathered flooding impact observations through a flood early warning system platform.

This Postdoc position will be part of a larger collaboration between ISTerre, LIG and IGE, since a twin project is proposed under Risk@UGA co-supervised by ISTerre, PACTE and LIG, dealing with seismic risk, and using the same agent-based modelling approach.

Applicants must hold a PhD degree (or be about to earn one) or have a University degree equivalent to a European PhD (8-year duration).

SELECTION PROCEDURE

Application deadline: 24thof August at 17:00 UTC

Applications will be evaluated through a three-step process:

Eligibility check of applications Monday 27th of August, 2018

1st round of selection: the applications will be evaluated by a Review Board during the week of August 27th-31st, 2018. Results will be given on Friday, August 31st.

2nd round of selection: shortlisted candidates will be invited for an interview session in Grenoble during the first week of September 2018.

The final decision will be given on Monday, September 10, 2018.