Vis-a-thon 2021
Identifying Flood and Cholera Hotspot in Haiti after Hurricane Matthew in 2016
Authors
Farah Nusrat Doctoral Student, University of Rhode Island, Department of Civil & Environmental Engineering
COLLABORATOR Rebecca Chinman MArch Candidate, Rhode Island School of Design, Architecture
Critic
Emma Hogarth
This project is about gaining a visual understanding of flooding on both local and country scales. During natural disasters, a country is already vulnerable to economic losses and any disease outbreak at that time can make the situation worse. Farah and Rebecca prepared a general visual representation of how rain, elevation, and cholera are interconnected.
“The difficult task for scientists/researchers is to make others understand what they are doing and how that is important to society. I am also having the same difficulty but when I am describing my research or ideas to people who have no prior knowledge about my work and they understand what I am telling them, that is my success as a researcher and also as a storyteller.”
Farah Nusrat
When Farah discussed her work to the critic Emma Hogarth the first time, she told Farah that instead of concentrating on the whole problem, focus on a smaller part of it to see what that tells Farah.
Initially, Farah thought to use all variables and the whole country, Haiti, that she used in her original research. However, she picked two variables to understand their influence on her study area. Also, she focused on a particular part of the country instead of the whole country.
The study area is Haiti and a town called Cayes located in the southwestern part of the country. In 2016, Hurricane Mathew hit Haiti on October 4. The country was suffering from cholera outbreaks since the big earthquake in 2010. In that situation, this hurricane caused more cholera cases, which made the country vulnerable to waterborne disease outbreaks. During natural disasters, a country is already vulnerable to economic losses and any disease outbreak at that time can make the situation worse. Satellite or station data availability is also a problem during natural disasters due to difficult environmental conditions.
Farah and Rebecca tried to see in this project if they have elevation data and extreme rainfall during Hurricane Matthew does this help to work as a proxy for flood data. Lower elevation and higher rainfall can cause inundation and we tried to see if there is any linkage between flooded areas and areas with higher cholera outbreak after Hurricane Matthew and to see the whole thing visually a bit differently than 2D.
“Explaining my work to Rebecca helped me to understand my research well and explain it clearly as she needed to understand my research for giving her inputs. Our backgrounds matched pretty well and it was easy to communicate as one of us is from civil engineering and one from architecture.”
Farah Nusrat
“I always thought of science and art as two totally different mediums but I never thought that these two can be mixed so well to get beautiful and impactful outputs. Apart from my participation, I am also surprised by how beautiful creations all other participants and collaborators made within this short time. I am really happy to participate in this workshop, which helps me to understand that visual communication is very important to spread knowledge and it is not necessary to use scientific visualization rather a mix of science and art to make people understand my work.”
Farah Nusrat
Tools Used in the Project
ArcGIS Adobe Photoshop Rhinoceros 3D
Copyright
© Identifying Flood and Cholera Hotspot in Haiti after Hurricane Matthew in 2016, 2021
This material is based upon work supported in part by the National Science Foundation under EPSCoR Cooperative Agreement #OIA-1655221.
Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.