An operational multiscale system for hazards prediction, mapping, and response

David Bacon (), Nash’at Ahmad, Thomas Dunn, Michael Monteith and Ananthakrishna Sarma

Natural Hazards: Journal of the International Society for the Prevention and Mitigation of Natural Hazards, 2008, vol. 44, issue 3, 317-327

Abstract: By definition, a crisis is a situation that requires assistance to be managed. Hence, response to a crisis involves the merging of local and non-local emergency response personnel. In this situation, it is critical that each participant: (1) know the roles and responsibilities of each of the other participants; (2) know the capabilities of each of the participants; and (3) have a common basis for action. For many types of natural disasters, this entails having a common operational picture of the unfolding events, including detailed information on the weather, both current and forecasted, that may impact on either the emergency itself or on response activities. The Consequences Assessment Tool Set (CATS) is a comprehensive package of hazard prediction models and casualty and damage assessment tools that provides a linkage between a modeled or observed effect and the attendant consequences for populations, infrastructure, and resources, and, hence, provides the common operational picture for emergency response. The Operational Multiscale Environment model with Grid Adaptivity (OMEGA) is an atmospheric simulation system that links the latest methods in computational fluid dynamics and high-resolution gridding technologies with numerical weather prediction to provide specific weather analysis and forecast capability that can be merged into the geographic information system framework of CATS. This paper documents the problem of emergency response as an end-to-end system and presents the integrated CATS–OMEGA system as a prototype of such a system that has been used successfully in a number of different situations. Copyright Springer Science+Business Media, Inc. 2008

Keywords: Emergency response; Consequences assessment; Consequence management; Unstructured adaptive grid; Numerical weather prediction; High-impact weather forecast (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2008
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1007/s11069-007-9132-3 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:nathaz:v:44:y:2008:i:3:p:317-327

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/economics/journal/11069

DOI: 10.1007/s11069-007-9132-3

Access Statistics for this article

Natural Hazards: Journal of the International Society for the Prevention and Mitigation of Natural Hazards is currently edited by Thomas Glade, Tad S. Murty and Vladimír Schenk

More articles in Natural Hazards: Journal of the International Society for the Prevention and Mitigation of Natural Hazards from Springer, International Society for the Prevention and Mitigation of Natural Hazards
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().