ASU Scholarship Showcase

Communicating climate risks is crucial when engaging the public to support climate action planning and addressing climate justice. How does evidence-based communication influence local residents’ risk perception and potential behavior change in support of climate planning? Built upon our previous study of Climate Justice maps illustrating high scores of both social and ecological vulnerability in Michigan’s Huron River watershed, USA, a quasi-experiment was conducted to examine the effects of Climate Justice mapping intervention on residents’ perceptions and preparedness for climate change associated hazards in Michigan. Two groups were compared: residents in Climate Justice areas with high social and ecological vulnerability scores in the watershed (n=76) and residents in comparison areas in Michigan (n=69). Measurements for risk perception include perceived exposure, sensitivity, and adaptability to hazards. Results indicate that risk information has a significant effect on perceived sensitivity and level of preparedness for future climate extremes among participants living in Climate Justice areas. Findings highlight the value of integrating scientific risk assessment information in risk communication to align calculated and perceived risks. This study suggests effective risk communication can influence local support of climate action plans and implementation of strategies that address climate justice and achieve social sustainability in local communities.

Accessibility is increasingly used as a metric when evaluating changes to public transport systems. Transit travel times contain variation depending on when one departs relative to when a transit vehicle arrives, and how well transfers are coordinated given a particular timetable. In addition, there is necessarily uncertainty in the value of the accessibility metric during sketch planning processes, due to scenarios which are underspecified because detailed schedule information is not yet available. This article presents a method to extend the concept of "reliable" accessibility to transit to address the first issue, and create confidence intervals and hypothesis tests to address the second.

Tikhonov regularization for projected solutions of large-scale ill-posed problems is considered. The Golub{Kahan iterative bidiagonalization is used to project the problem onto a subspace and regularization then applied to nd a subspace approximation to the full problem. Determination of the regularization, parameter for the projected problem by unbiased predictive risk estimation, generalized cross validation, and discrepancy principle techniques is investigated. It is shown that the regularized parameter obtained by the unbiased predictive risk estimator can provide a good estimate which can be used for a full problem that is moderately to severely ill-posed. A similar analysis provides the weight parameter for the weighted generalized cross validation such that the approach is also useful in these cases, and also explains why the generalized cross validation without weighting is not always useful. All results are independent of whether systems are over- or underdetermined. Numerical simulations for standard one-dimensional test problems and two- dimensional data, for both image restoration and tomographic image reconstruction, support the analysis and validate the techniques. The size of the projected problem is found using an extension of a noise revealing function for the projected problem [I. Hn etynkov a, M. Ple singer, and Z. Strako s, BIT Numer. Math., 49 (2009), pp. 669{696]. Furthermore, an iteratively reweighted regularization approach for edge preserving regularization is extended for projected systems, providing stabilization of the solutions of the projected systems and reducing dependence on the determination of the size of the projected subspace.