Towards a Coupled Migration and Weather Simulation: South Sudan Conflict

Multiscale simulations present a new approach to increase the level of accuracy in terms of forced displacement forecasting, which can help humanitarian aid organizations to better plan resource allocations for refugee camps. People’s decisions to move may depend on perceived levels of safety, accessibility or weather conditions; simulating this combination realistically requires a coupled approach. In this paper, we implement a multiscale simulation for the South Sudan conflict in 2016–2017 by defining a macroscale model covering most of South Sudan and a microscale model covering the region around the White Nile, which is in turn coupled to weather data from the Copernicus project. We couple these models cyclically in two different ways: using file I/O and using the MUSCLE3 coupling environment. For the microscale model, we incorporated weather factors including precipitation and river discharge datasets. To investigate the effects of the multiscale simulation and its coupling with weather data on refugees’ decisions to move and their speed, we compare the results with single-scale approaches in terms of the total validation error, total execution time and coupling overhead.