Flood research duo aims to reduce future impacts

In September 2024, Hurricane Helene dropped 30 inches of rain across western North Carolina, causing landslides across major highways, downing thousands of trees, killing over 30 people and displacing thousands more as it dismantled entire towns.

“North Carolina is flooding more than ever before,” Miyuki Hino says. “It’s something we hear often from the people we interview.”

“In eastern North Carolina, we’ve estimated that almost half of flooded buildings are outside of the floodplain, most of which were uninsured,” Antonia “Toni” Sebastian adds. “More importantly, we’re seeing that a lot of repeat exposure is happening in communities that might have less financial capacity to cope with the flooding.”

Hino and Sebastian are both flood researchers at UNC-Chapel Hill and have been addressing this environmental challenge for over 10 years.

A social scientist and public policy expert, Hino studies how weather events like hurricanes, floods and heat waves affect people, their households and entire communities. Sebastian, an engineer and hydrologist, creates models to track how flooding and other natural hazards evolve over time and explores strategies — both technical and policy-based — to reduce future flood impacts.

The duo came to Carolina in 2020 as part of a cluster hire through the environment, energy and ecology program, where both are adjunct assistant professors. They work in different departments: Hino is an associate professor in the city and regional planning department in the UNC College of Arts and Sciences; Sebastian is an assistant professor in the Earth, marine and environmental sciences department in the College.

They became fast friends and now share a lab, students and sometimes projects. Together, they’re training the next generation of scientists to tackle this ever-evolving challenge with more effective strategies.

“Flooding is an intractable problem,” Sebastian stresses. “It takes multiple disciplines to figure out how to address it. There are hydrological, meteorological, societal and engineering aspects that all have to be considered. It is an all-encompassing, 21st-century challenge.”

Mapping who’s affected

Sebastian studies compound flooding, when inland and coastal floods converge. Her team is mapping flood zones across the Carolinas with unprecedented detail, offering new insights into how storms interact with the landscape.

They’re also examining how climate change is reshaping storms. “Tropical cyclones are getting wetter, and they might be slowing down,” Sebastian says.

Sebastian is pioneering a new way to monitor disaster recovery, using artificial intelligence to analyze 360-degree images of storm-damaged neighborhoods, taken by a GoPro mounted on a car.

The goal is to give local and state agencies a fast, scalable tool to assess how communities are bouncing back. If successful, the technology could survey 300 to 400 structures in just a few hours.

“That’s powerful information for decision-makers,” Sebastian says.

Tracking human impact

While Sebastian works behind the scenes to model and predict the effects of future storms, Hino is the person on the ground talking with the people impacted by these disasters.

Her research dives into the ripple effects of extreme weather events — floods, hurricanes, heat waves — and how they impact everything from property values to migration decisions.

“If you flood once, maybe you think it’s a fluke,” she says. “But what if you flood three or four times? Does your decision to stay or move start to change?”

Ultimately, Hino wants to motivate governments, from local councils to federal agencies, to design better policies.

“We shape the consequences of disasters, from where we build to how we build to who gets help afterward,” she emphasizes. “And if we understand the impacts better, we can design better systems to make these weather events and not weather disasters.”

Read more about their flood research.