Save It for the "Hot" Day: An LLM-Empowered Visual Analytics System for Heat Risk Management

TL;DR

This paper presents Havior, an LLM-empowered visual analytics system that combines numerical models and news reports to improve heat risk assessment and mitigation strategies through innovative visualization and semantic analysis.

Contribution

The paper introduces a novel hybrid system leveraging LLMs and visualization to enhance heat risk management, integrating diverse data sources for comprehensive insights.

Findings

System effectively combines numerical and news data for better risk assessment

Visualization tools improve understanding of heat risk factors

Case studies demonstrate practical utility for city heatwave management

Abstract

The escalating frequency and intensity of heat-related climate events, particularly heatwaves, emphasize the pressing need for advanced heat risk management strategies. Current approaches, primarily relying on numerical models, face challenges in spatial-temporal resolution and in capturing the dynamic interplay of environmental, social, and behavioral factors affecting heat risks. This has led to difficulties in translating risk assessments into effective mitigation actions. Recognizing these problems, we introduce a novel approach leveraging the burgeoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) to extract rich and contextual insights from news reports. We hence propose an LLM-empowered visual analytics system, Havior, that integrates the precise, data-driven insights of numerical models with nuanced news report information. This hybrid approach enables a more comprehensive assessment of heat risks and better identification, assessment, and mitigation of heat-related threats. The system incorporates novel visualization designs, such as "thermoglyph" and news glyph, enhancing intuitive understanding and analysis of heat risks. The integration of LLM-based techniques also enables advanced information retrieval and semantic knowledge extraction that can be guided by experts' analytics needs. Our case studies on two cities that faced significant heatwave events and interviews with five experts have demonstrated the usefulness of our system in providing in-depth and actionable insights for heat risk management.