Quantifying Resilience and Uncertainty in Coastal Flooding Events: Framework for Assessing Urban Vulnerability

AbstractFlood resilience is a desirable state of natural and built environments in dealing with hazards such as extreme rainfalls, storm surges, and hurricanes. Here, resilience means the capacity to reach an acceptable level of functionality during and after a flood. Observations of the recent history of flood disasters in New Orleans and New York City (NYC) have suggested the necessity of quantifying resilience in these regions utilizing a floodplain’s vulnerability assessment platform. Once a meaningful and well-recognized method is developed, then resources can be allocated to increase resiliency. In this study, redundancy, resourcefulness, robustness, and rapidity metrics based on socioeconomic, manmade, and natural conditions are developed to quantify coastal resilience. Exposure and susceptibility are also defined and evaluated for quantifying vulnerability. The proposed evaluation method, which is based on the linear combination of the developed metrics, uses a multicriteria decision making techni...