Andrea Silverman
New York University, NY·Engineering
Street flooding in cities endangers lives, damages property and blocks roads, and climate change is expected to make it worse. Yet most U.S.
- Fields
Engineering
Earth & Environmental Science
- Topics
urban flooding
flood sensors
FloodNet
- Grants
- 2 known grants, through May 2027
What they work on
- Develop and optimize data processing tools that clean and prepare street-level flood depth records from New York City's FloodNet sensor network for practical use.
- Assess what flood data the National Weather Service, city agencies, emergency managers and residents need on real-time, intermediate and long-term time scales, and how it can feed into their existing information systems.
- Share FloodNet data with stakeholders to jointly define research questions on predicting and reducing urban flooding, and co-design tools for combining and interpreting the data.
- Evaluate whether a system of low-cost, self-powered flood sensors with cellular data links, AI-driven processing pipelines and map dashboards could be adopted by other cities, through I-Corps interviews across the industry.
More about the research
cities have no measured data on how often their streets flood, how deep the water gets or how long it lasts. Without that data, emergency crews cannot respond in real time and engineers cannot design flood defenses well. This work centers on FloodNet, a network of low-cost street-level flood sensors in New York City. One grant studies how to turn the sensor data into tools that agencies, forecasters and residents can use. The other explores whether the technology can be adopted by other cities.
Why it matters
Real-time, street-level flood data could help city emergency services respond faster during storms. It could also help transportation, housing and flood-control agencies design better infrastructure, and let residents prepare for floods. That could reduce property damage and loss of life. The New York City system may offer a framework that other flood-prone cities can copy.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Avantika Gori
Rice University, TX·Engineering
Develop a flood-risk framework based on performance-based design, which judges solutions by how well they meet stated goals, and apply it in two rural Texas communities.
Branko Kerkez
University of Michigan, MI·Engineering
Investigate how social capital (trust and relationships) shapes decision-making among rural and urban dam operators, and translate these insights into digital tools that promote coordinated dam releases.
Katharine Mach
University of Miami, FL·Earth & Environmental Science
Identify flood simulation technologies that most speed up modeling of flood risk under multiple flood drivers and response options while keeping accuracy, and benchmark the maximum achievable speeds.
The school
New York University: 72 labs on PI Pages, $1.5B a year on research, 540 research doctorates a year.
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