Dissemination of weather information to emergency managers: a decision support tool

Since 1992, the Dissemination Project has been conducting experiments at the Forecast Systems Laboratory in Boulder, CO, USA, to determine the use of advanced meteorological information by local government operations. Local emergency preparedness agencies (involving sheriff and police departments) can gain great benefit from appropriate information about weather hazards. The Dissemination Project employs a workstation specially designed to focus on four weather hazards: flash floods; fire danger; severe weather; and disruptive winter storms. The system uses high-resolution weather data sets produced by analysis and prediction models, as well as the WSR-88D radar, which provides mesoscale detail about rainfall distribution that is not available from rain-gauge networks. Specific to the workstation is MeteoAssert, a subsystem that extracts weather assertions from gridded data using territory, time, and parameter models and organizes them into descriptions-coherent chunks of related assertions. Both the original data sets and the assertions are visualized on different media: images; maps; graphs; tables; text; and sound. The first application developed on the workstation was the Basin Rainfall Monitoring System, designed to assist emergency managers in evaluating flash-flood situations.