Building a Customizable UI for Analyzing Natural Hazards

Natural hazard events such as fluvial and pluvial flooding, natural and unnatural wildfires, and landslides, have proven to be complex problems to solve using a single model to predict these natural threats. Analysts utilize tools to understand the overall hazard risk of specific locations based on natural hazards and other environmental factors. Tooling to evaluate the risk of specific areas of interest (AOI) can be time consuming and costly.

The Hazard Analysis Tool is an open-source analysis tool that allows users to overlay, analyze, and review natural hazards in a single place to better understand risks for a large or small AOI. The tool is customizable for any user utilizing geospatial hazard data from open-source resources or using their own models, user-specific data, and other environmental data that is impactful for their analyses. In its current form, the web map shows a few of the potential features that can be implemented alongside a map; such as a legend, layer toggle, and zoom-in/zoom-out buttons. Leaflet, an open-source JavaScript library used to build web mapping applications, provides an extensive library of tools as a foundation for quick implementation of additional features and customizations. The Hazard Analysis Tool can be hosted from any service such as GitHub, SharePoint, AWS, Azure, or Google App Engine. This affords the user flexibility in choosing a hosting service while also avoiding costs associated with licensed geospatial software. In this presentation, we will demonstrate the capabilities of the Hazard Analysis Tool, how it was built, and how it can be customized to fit a user’s analysis needs.