Abstract: Property-scale flood risk is driven by micro-topography that is poorly captured by traditional flood maps and coarse elevation data. This project develops a LiDAR- based geospatial pipeline that automatically constructs bare-earth digital elevation models, extracts terrain metrics (relative elevation, slope, and flow convergence), and combines them into an interpretable 0–1 terrain-risk score for individual properties. We implement bootstrap and split-sample robustness tests and deliver a user-interactive dashboard that visualizes multi-scale elevation context, enabling underwriters to screen locations for terrain-driven flood susceptibility.
Keywords: flood risk, LiDAR, digital elevation model, terrain analysis, geospatial pipeline, risk scoring, insurance underwriting, dashboard visualization
Watch the team present this project at 01:11:44 in the session recording here.
Faculty Advisor
Wendy Klusendorf has over twenty years of experience in manufacturing, supply chain, and procurement. She graduated from the University of Chicago Master of Science in Analytics program in 2016 and has been working for the university since 2017. She currently works as the Strategic Sourcing Director at Sabert Corporation in Chicago.