F. Rossi, M. Folino & F. Lambert!An advanced set of tools for the information management of natural...

An advanced set of tools for the information

management of natural hazards

F. Rossi, M. Folino & F. Lambert!DATAMATIngegneria del Sistemi S.p.A.,Rome, Italy

Abstract

In the management of natural hazards, one of the major constraints to theeffectiveness of interventions and relief actions is represented by the difficultcirculation of reliable information among involved entities, on occurrence of anyhazardous event. This, worsened by a poorly unified and homogeneousapproach, could have a dramatic impact on planning and execution of safetyprocedures. In this context, DATAMAT is conceiving several initiatives that,starting from the concrete operational experience of civil protection entities, areproducing an integrated set of tools in support of the decision process.The outstanding initiative presented in the paper is FORMIDABLE (FriendlyOperational Risk Management through Interoperable Decision Aid Based onLocal Events), a joint European enterprise aimed at standardising emergencymanagement procedures and derive from that an interoperable system providinga standardised access to the information required for natural risks management.As repository of natural disasters related knowledge, FORMIDABLE willrepresent the main source for local authorities who will receive near-real timestandardised operational tasks and scenario description. EO data will supporthigh performance Internet GIS application, showing dynamic thematic view ofthe event scenario, through the integration of remotely sensed images with riskmaps and the elaboration and analysis of dynamic damage assessment models.Furthermore, the paper presents two further examples of tools, aimed atprototyping specific aspects of the FORMIDABLE suite of decision aid systems:SIRECAM, a fully GIS-based decision support tool at regional level, supportinglocal civil protection authorities on hydrogeological hazards (floods, drought,landslide); DECIDE, a system integrating Earth Observation information in thedecision support process for flood.

Management Information Systems, C.A. Brebbia & P. Pascolo (Editors) © 2000 WIT Press, www.witpress.com, ISBN 1-85312-815-5

92 Management Information Systems

1 Introducing the context

In the management of natural hazards, one of the major constraints to the effec-tiveness of interventions and relief actions is represented by the difficult circula-tion of reliable information among the different operational entities involved, onoccurrence of any hazardous event. This could have a dramatic impact on theplanning and execution of safety procedures, such as people displacement, thusincreasing losses of lives and goods.As a matter of fact, the whole information lifecycle, from the phase of preven-tion, to emergency planning and management, and to post-crisis assessment, ispresently missing a homogenous approach in terms of data, methodologies andtools.DATAMAT, one of the largest Italian Companies developing and integratinginformation systems, particularly with strong real-time constraints, has per-formed a critical analysis of where emergency management operations encoun-tered major problems, causing even partial failure or delay in recovery action,highlighted a generic lack of co-ordination, and a poorly unified and homogene-ous approach. Often actions have been planned and executed with a limited fieldof view about the real size of the events and the involved responsibilities foremergency management. Moreover, this "local management" has produced con-flicts between the Central Civil Protection authorities and the local administra-tors, thus hindering the efficient execution of interventions.From this context, the main requirements arising from the crucial phase of emer-gency management when facing natural disasters are the following:• Necessity to share among all national and local authorities a common meth-

odology, consistent knowledge bases, and interoperable supporting tools,from disasters prevention to post-event assessment phases;

• Precise identification of flexible and easy tasks ensuring efficient interven-tions and immediate relief to the affected citizens;

• Quick response times to receive accurate and homogeneous informationdescribing in detail both expected crisis scenario, and actual situation.

The intervention areas identified are mainly three:* The overall co-ordinationlayer, particularly importantwhen the disaster affects largegeographical areas, and severaloperational entities must co-operate in the intervention, andspecific resources mobilised;* The task-specific decisionsupport, the first ring of thechain starting from a diffuseand detailed knowledge of theterritory, typical of localoperators;* The thematic plug-in's,

Overall Co-ordination Layer

Task-specificDecisionSupport

FORMIDABLE

DECIDE

Theme-specificPlug-in


Management Information Systems 93

which on the basis of scientific knowledge and value added information, performnumber-crunching as well as specific processing improving the physicalunderstanding of the phenomenon, upon request of the centralised co-ordination.The following section will present three experiences DATAMAT is conducting,generally within European contexts and with the proactive partnership of opera-tional actors, to develop advanced tools for the management of information insuch a complex scenario.

2 The methodological and co-ordination component:

FORMIDABLE

The FORMIDABLE Project has been approved in late 1999 for co-funding bythe European Commission DG Information Society, in the 1ST programme of 5*FP for Research and Technological Development. The very large partnership in-volves, further to DATAMAT, project co-ordinator:• the Civil Protection Authorities of Italy (DPC), Spain (DGPC), and Greece

(GSCP);• universities (Universidad Complutense de Madrid and National and

Kapodistrian University of Athens);• scientific institutions (Italian National Seismic Survey, Greek Earthquake

Planning and Protection Organisation, Applied Meteorology Foundation ofFlorence, National Observatory of Athens);

• local administration (Region de Murcia / CIDA, Province of Modena);• development and service commercial companies (TEUCHOS (F) and

VITROCISET (I)).The main project objective is to contribute to the definition of a EuropeanStandard Methodology for Emergency Management based on the consensus ofmajor Mediterranean operational actors, and develop an interoperable supportsystem prototype which integrates the resulting guidelines with data and toolsneeded to operate during an emergency, in line with Council Decision 98/22/ECof 19 December 1997.The FORMIDABLE objective will be achieved through:<* The formulation of a standard methodology, initially tailored at

Mediterranean level, but applicable at European level, for the definition andexecution of emergency plans, able to be customised for different types ofenvironmental risks as floods, landslides, fires, earthquakes, volcaniceruptions.

* The specification and the development of a standard interoperableemergency management system prototype, compliant with theMethodology and capable to support the decision making process of theauthorities responsible for emergency management.

* The validation and promotion of the above results within the emergencymanagement community, through the development of two specificapplications, able to represent suitable test beds with respect to themethodology procedures and the operational tasks to be performed in frontof realistic emergency management scenarios.



The effective achievement of the project objectives will be measured andverified during the whole project life cycle, through a strong involvement ofscientific experts and potential users (direct and indirect) in all the project lifecycle by means of dedicated workshops, interviews and questionnaires. To thisaim, users groups will be involved in definition of requirements and in therevision, assessment and evaluation of the results of the project activities. Theuser groups will include the most significant entities involved in the managementof the Emergency: Civil Protection Authorities, Public Administrations (atnational, regional, provincial and town council level), River Basin Authorities.

2.1 Methodological standardisation

The major objective of proposing a standard European methodology forEmergency Management is the creation of a common knowledge base for Civilprotection operators and Local Authorities to ease on one hand informationexchange, and on the other hand resource management and intervention.In order to fulfil these requirements, there is the obvious need to unify theterminology used to address natural hazards management according to anhomogeneous point of view, in particular with respect to:• type of risks and natural disasters,• the hierarchical allocation of responsibilities at different levels, being this

related at the different role each organisation plays in different Europeancountries.

The application context of the methodology is presented in the following SADTdiagram.

Figure 1: Operational Context



The starting point of this activity will consist in the analysis of the existingAUGUSTUS Methodology, prepared by the Italian DPC, which addresses ageneral method for the definition, preparation, management, and updating of allemergency plans issued by the Civil Protection.The method stems from the old approach to emergency plan based on the censusof resources towards a new one more related to resources availability. To thisaim, it is felt necessary to organise emergency planning through a series ofsupport functions (currently the method addresses 14 functions), matching twoprimary objectives:

to assess for each support function the availability of the resources andmeans, as provided by both public administrations and agencies that concurto their definitionto identify the responsible of the specific support function, for co-ordinationof the specific operations and for updating data used within this specificcontext.

The 14 Support Functions have been conceived as follows:

SF1. Technical and Scientific Support for the scientific analysis andphysical interpretation of the event and related data,

SF2. Health, Social Assistance and Veterinary Services for the managementof all people and means involved in the sanitary area,

SF3. Mass-media and Information for the distribution of specificinformation through mass-media and to citizens,

SF4. Volunteers for the co-ordination and training of specific volunteersorganisations,

SF5. Material and Resources for estimation of all resources necessaryduring emergency, their location and availability,

SF6. Transport and Mobility for transfer of material and people, to optimiseevacuation paths and regulate intervention flows,

SF7. Telecommunications for the provision of TLC networks, as back upand support to operations,

SF8. Utilities for the co-ordination and maintenance of all necessary services(e.g. water, electricity, gas),

SF9. Damage Assessment for the estimation/evaluation of damages (e.g. topeople, buildings, agriculture),

SF10. Search and Rescue Operational Organisations for the co-ordination ofall entities involved in S&R operations,

SF11. Local Authorities for the co-ordination at aids at local level in terms ofresources, necessary services, accessible areas,

SF12. Dangerous Materials for the management of storage location andmaterial census with respect to the impact on affected areas,

SF13. Population Logistics for co-ordination of assistance to population, interms of identification and set-up of suitable areas to provide assistanceand necessary services,

SF14. Operational Co-ordination for the management of the supportfunctions and the rational interventions of means and people.



2.2 System definitionAll functions and interfaces will be fully developed and operated, with each SFhaving its own dedicated workstation. The system will be implemented by meansof a coherent integration of different technological means ranging from Internetto fault tolerant servers up to satellites for both communication and earthobservation. The proposed project covers the specification of the systemarchitecture of the Operational Centre, where the support Functions will beoperated. The Emergency Management System can be allocated both at CivilProtection premises and at local Authorities (e.g. Prefects, Mayors) sites, andtailored in size and functions according to the entity of the event, according tothe principle of hierarchical scalability.The System shall be able to collect heterogeneous dynamic data coming fromdifferent sources such as: in-situ sensors, meteorological radar & satellites, EOsatellites, external data-bases. Once collected, data are stored, together with staticinformation (geographical information, available resources, etc.), into aninteroperable "Emergency Management" database, located on the Main Server.A set of specific applications can then be applied to derive, from the rawacquired data, more specific information to be exploited by dedicated subsystemsimplementing the fourteen Support Functions.

2.3 Pilot applicationsIn order to test the FORMIDABLE functions in realistic scenarios, twoapplications will be carried on different sites. The first one will address seismicrisk on an Italian test site, while the second one will address floods in Spain.The selection of these two application is justified by the need to analyse theprototype behaviour in different types of natural risks, in particular unpredictableas earthquakes and predictable as floods.During the course of the project, the FORMIDABLE Consortium shall be opento consider new initiatives to obtain extra funding (thematic networks, concertedactions, funds made available from potential users) to extend the scope of theproject to new applications or sites. Furthermore, the possibility to favourvoluntary additional test sites will be promoted during User Group discussions.

3 The GIS Component: SIRECAM

Flood related information management for pre-crisis phase is typically under theresponsibility of local Civil Protection Authorities, who have access to a widerange of dynamic geophysical data sources (meteorological parameters, riverobservations, land status, ...) and related historical information. Timeliness andreliability constrain collection and analysis of this complex suite of information,as quick and safe alerts towards operational organisations improve interventioneffectiveness, minimising damages and losses.Within this context, DATAMAT has being developing SIRECAM - System forthe Environmental control of the Calabria region - on behalf of the regional CPAfor flood-related information management of Crati river.



SIRECAM first release, recently put into operations, is focused on flood andmudslide forecasting, with an automatic alert of the operational Civil Protectioncomponents.A network of hydrometers, rain-gauges and thermometers collects the needednear real-time information to feed a rainfall-runoff model, allowing 12-hoursriver level forecasting at four sections, and eventually generating alarms.Collected data are also used to assess drought and mudslide risk in the basin.On alarm occurrence, SIRECAM automatically manages the transmission offaxes and phone calls to warn involved organisations. An embedded GISapplication allows a geo-referenced presentation of all data, providing a clear anduser-friendly interface, with different layers of flood related information ontodigital cartography, including intervention support (resources availability /location), and Internet accessibility.

Figure 2: SIRECAM Human Machine Interface

The main functions for the users are:• Real-time presentation of sensors measurements (in 15 mins from sensing);• Archive and intelligent retrieve of historical series;• Statistical processing;• Risk assessment and evaluation;• Identification of geographical areas potentially impacted by hazard;• Automatic (configurable) thresholds management for alert and alarm;• Automatic support in emergency procedures execution;• Automatic handling of e-mail, fax and voice communication during crisis.



Several thematic layers are superimposed on basic cartography, as a result ofrainfall run-off models, draught models and landslide models, allowing a quickidentification for the operator of the evolution and dimension of naturalphenomenon.DATAMAT, taking into account the early experience coming from preliminaryfield trials, is planning evolution of the system in terms of:* enlargement of data fusion aspects (integration of in-situ measurements with

Weather Radar and Earth Observation data);* emergency plans and procedures management;* internet accessibility of knowledge base from distributed clients.

4 The Earth Observation component: DeciDe

As an example of thematic plug-in, i.e. an information system with a specificscientific and technological connotation providing a value adding service for theoperational user, the DeciDe Project is presented.Decide is a project funded by the European Space Agency to a consortium led byVITROCISET of Rome, with DATAMAT and Applied Meteorology Foundationof Florence, with the intent of implementing and demonstrating a small set ofpre-operational value-adding services in support of flood management. Thesecan be summarised as focused on the provision of an earth observation layer insupport to decision making process for the management of natural disasters. Theservices are being built on existing information products and decision-makingenvironments and shall be applied to a selected phase(s) of a selected disastermanagement application.DeciDe started from two major elements:* an existing EO value adding environment;* an existing decision support environment as used in real disaster

management operations.The project does not intend to modify theuser's existing decision support ^ %/.environment. It seeks to providecompatible interfaces and formats forinteroperation, so that the user's systemscan handle EO-derived information in asimilar fashion as they already handleinformation derived from other sources,e.g. GIS data. Earth observationinformation is applied in support to thedecision making process of the disastermanagers.The geographical context is representedby the Arno basin. In this basin,composed by the Arno river and itstributaries, both plain and flash floodscan happen. The tributaries, despite their



little dimensions, have a decisive role in the Arno basin floods due to the veryrapid evolution of their water level.The local River Basin Authority of Florence collects several information usefulto predict environmental disaster as floods, and through DeciDe it will besupplied periodically with an overflow forecasting thematic map to the CivilProtection Agency in order to give another support in the decisional process.The flood forecasting are elaborated using some types of data and productsalready available (i.e. data of weather radar, a DEM, rain quantity estimation andrain forecasting), plus new products (i.e. soil moisture estimation and soilinfiltration rate).The SAR products are used in order to estimate the soil moisture. The followingfigure shows the logic of value adding process, starting from satellite and in-situdata, up to the improvement of existing decision support system.

Figure 3: DeciDe Value Adding Logic

EO data are used for the calibration of the soil infiltration rate product, updatingthe information using other sources with the needed rate.The flood modelling is able to forecast the overflows of the rivers with a goodprecision, when it uses measured data of rain. The time of the forecast dependson the type of the basin and usually it is about six/nine hours.Rain forecasting extends the prediction capability of the system supplying oneday in advance the warnings to the Civil Protection.

5 Conclusions

The information management related to natural hazards is a very complexactivity, as it involves several types of data sources, data types, applications andusers.



MeteorologicalIn situ sensors Radar & Satellites

Data Acquisition DatamanagementSecurity & useradministrationMonitor & controlUtilities

Meteorological Climatological GeographicalProducts qualityData acquisitionmanagementData Distribution

Applications

Meteo forecastingMeteo nowcastingMosaickingData fusionThematic productsEvents modellingWarningAutomatic bulletins

Emergency Management j_

Figure 4: System Conceptual Layout

The implementation of a new system concept will thus be guided by:a interoperable, scalable, reliable and portable client/server distributed

architecture, easily upgradeable and adaptable to emergency needs, based onemerging standards and technologies (e.g. CORBA, JAVA, parallel DB);

a near-real time response time to data access, event description generation toimprove the efficiency of interventions;

Q high performance Internet GIS for near real time distribution of thematiccartography, dynamically upgraded with the actual phenomenon evolution;

Q multimedia user interface tailored to different operators' profiles to enhancethe user friendliness of the system in different operational scenarios;

a Meteorology (in-situ sensors, meteorological satellite, weather radar, outputfrom numerical and dynamical-statistical modelling), Earth Observation(optical and microwave), Positioning (GPS), and remote mobile terminals toprovide greater coverage and accuracy in the data collection processes;

a Internet/Intranet technologies to support the distribution of information tocitizens and Emergency Management Operators.

The starting point should be, whenever it exist, what is already available. Thekey point is therefore integration, between local systems and centralised co-ordination, as well as with dedicated thematic infrastructures. The perspective isto achieve interoperability during all the phases of prevention, planning,emergency management and assessment, as unique warranty for the provision offresh and reliable information to operational decision-makers.



6 References

[1] Galanti, E. II metodo Augustus. DPC Informa. Civil Protection Department,Rome, May-June 1997.

[2] Calabresi, G. The Use of ERS SAR for Flood Monitoring: An OverallAssessment, Proceedings of Second International Workshop on ERSApplications, London, U.K., 6-8 Dec., 1995, ESA SP-383, PublicationsDivision, ESTEC, Noordwijk, The Netherlands, pp. 237-242.

[3] Meneguzzo, F., Migliorini, S., Vicente, G.A., Bottai, L., Gozzini, B., and G.Zipoli (1998a). Satellite Rainfall Estimates in the Mediterranean Countries.Verifications in Tuscany (Italy). Proceedings of the 1C AM Conference(International Conference on Alpine Meteorology), Turin, Italy, September14-19,1998.

[4] http://www.protezionecivile.it II servizio Nazionale di Protezione Civile(The National Civil Protection Service) - Italian Civil Protection - Officialweb site.

[5] http://www.fema.gov U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agency -Official web site.

[6] http://earth.esa.mt/disastermgt European Space Agency - DisasterManagement web site.


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