The Environmental Resilience Institute at UVA's Collaborative Research program, known as CoLabs, is funding a project by Majid Shafiee-Jood, an assistant professor in the Department of Engineering Systems and Environment, and his partners at UVA's Weldon Cooper Center and Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy. Weldon Cooper economist and principal scientist Art Small and Jay Shimshack, associate professor of public policy and economics and the associate dean for academic affairs at Batten, are teaming with Shafiee-Jood to study the timing of hurricane evacuation decisions. The team will use information from different data sources such as anonymized cell phone data, historical hurricane forecasts, evacuation orders and demographics, to better understand individual evacuation decisions and collective evacuation patterns in coastal areas. Coastal areas face significant risk from more frequent extreme weather events associated with climate change attributed to human activity; the resilience of coastal communities in the face of these risks depends substantially on how quickly and smoothly communities can carry out large-scale evacuations under threat from major events, such as hurricanes. Insights from this project will help coastal communities devise more effective reactive and long-term plans in response to natural disasters. The project aims to understand individual and collective responses to natural disasters by connecting early warning information about hurricanes, emergency managers' corresponding evacuation orders, and the public's evacuation decisions. The project specifically highlights the role of emergency managers and their decision-making under uncertainty, and investigates the effectiveness of evacuation orders. Additionally, while most previous studies have focused on stated behaviors of individuals through post-hurricane surveys, this research focuses on real-time evacuation actions during a hurricane using newly available mobility datasets. While answering fundamental questions in the project, the team's preliminary findings and datasets also will help to develop proposals for external funding sources such as the National Science Foundation's Decision, Risk and Management Sciences program and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Social, Behavioral and Economics Science programs.