Overview
“AI-Enhanced Flood Storytelling for Mobilizing Action and Building Resilience in Underserved Communities” is a cutting-edge research initiative led by Dr. Jiaqi Gong at the University of Alabama. This project, supported by CIROH and NOAA’s Office of Water Prediction, aims to improve flood risk communication by combining the power of generative AI with community-centered storytelling.
Traditional flood warnings often fail to reach socioeconomically vulnerable populations effectively, due to gaps in technological access, communication barriers, and historical mistrust. This project seeks to change that—by creating an intelligent, inclusive storytelling toolkit that tailors flood risk information to each community’s unique context.
Project Goals
- Contextualize Flood Resilience
Use focus groups, knowledge graphs, and NLP to deeply understand how vulnerable communities perceive and respond to flood risks. - Harness Generative AI
Fine-tune large language models (e.g., GPT-4) to generate compelling, community-specific flood narratives that resonate and prompt action. - Deliver a Storytelling Toolkit
Co-design a practical, user-centered toolkit for agencies like the National Weather Service (NWS) and local governments to communicate flood risks effectively through narrative.
Key Features
- 📍 Community-Centric Design: Focused engagement with underserved communities in the Southeast and Northeast U.S. through focus groups and participatory research
- 🤖 AI-Powered Narrative Generation: Fine-tuned LLMs that produce culturally and contextually relevant flood stories based on real data
- 🧭 Toolkits for Practitioners: Guidelines, templates, and digital assets (including visuals and infographics) designed to support real-world flood communication efforts
- 📊 Scalable Evaluation: Testing the effectiveness of stories via crowdsourcing platforms and social media to measure impact and engagement
Partners & Collaborators
- Alabama Water Institute
- NOAA Office of Water Prediction (OWP)
- Cooperative Institute for Research to Operations in Hydrology (CIROH)
Broader Impact
This project strengthens flood communication infrastructure by:
- Empowering communities with localized, relatable information
- Enhancing trust and action through narrative
- Contributing open-source tools and datasets to the public domain
- Supporting the development of equitable climate resilience strategies