  Human mobility is influenced by environmental change and natural disasters.
Researchers have used trip distance distribution, radius of gyration of
movements, and individuals' visited locations to understand and capture human
mobility patterns and trajectories. However, our knowledge of human movements
during natural disasters is limited owing to both a lack of empirical data and
the low precision of available data. Here, we studied human mobility using
high-resolution movement data from individuals in New York City during and for
several days after Hurricane Sandy in 2012. We found the human movements
followed truncated power-law distributions during and after Hurricane Sandy,
although the {\beta} value was noticeably larger during the first 24 hours
after the storm struck. Also, we examined two parameters: the center of mass
and the radius of gyration of each individual's movements. We found that their
values during perturbation states and steady states are highly correlated,
suggesting human mobility data obtained in steady states can possibly predict
the perturbation state. Our results demonstrate that human movement
trajectories experienced significant perturbations during hurricanes, but also
exhibited high resilience. We expect the study will stimulate future research
on the perturbation and inherent resilience of human mobility under the
influence of natural disasters. For example, mobility patterns in coastal urban
areas could be examined as tropical cyclones approach, gain or dissipate in
strength, and as the path of the storm changes. Understanding nuances of human
mobility under the influence of disasters will enable more effective
evacuation, emergency response planning and development of strategies and
policies to reduce fatality, injury, and economic loss.
