EMPOWER– Integrating Social and Built Environment Vulnerabilities with Mesonets to Enhance Emergency Preparedness and Response to Extreme Weather

Emergency preparedness and the ability to respond and adapt quickly as extreme weather events progress is increasingly important as the impacts of extreme events increase. While many datasets provide context for an extreme weather event, there is a disconnect between real-time measured weather data and emergency decision making. The EMPOWER (Exploitation of Mesonets for emergency Preparedness and response in Weather ExtRemes) project aims to connect local, state, and federal emergency managers to the data-rich environment provided by mesonets. EMPOWER is a pilot program using the New York State Mesonet (NYSM) that builds the groundwork for a larger pipeline of contextualized information extracted from mesonets throughout the United States and internationally. Here we present a dashboard tailored for emergency managers that integrates high-resolution mesonet data with both social environment and built environment datasets. The NYSM is the backbone for the tool, which records and publishes observations every 5 minutes for temperature, humidity, pressure, precipitation rate and accumulation, wind speed and direction, soil moisture and temperature, solar radiation, and snow depth across New York state. Mesonets can offer a unique view of local weather conditions by providing access to risk potentials in real time. Notably, moisture in the air and soil, temperature, wind speed, and wind direction can indicate fire and flood risks. Temperature combined with relative humidity or wind speed quantifies the risk for heat-related extremes. The data when integrated with localized social and built environment vulnerabilities provide decision makers with information needed to help manage people and resources before, during, and after an extreme weather event.

In this work, we present the progress made in developing the EMPOWER dashboard, which merges NYSM data with social and built environment context. A key feature of the dashboard is its customizable alert functionality, designed for emergency managers to tailor alerts based on locale-specific needs, enabling them to define the variables and thresholds that are relevant to their constituents. Additionally, weather can deviate from forecasts in impactful ways as an event unfolds. Unexpected deviations from the forecast, occurring after resources have been deployed or alerts and warnings have been issued, can leave both constituents and emergency managers unprepared for an evolving situation. Another goal of the dashboard is to monitor deviations from the forecast, using the NYSM measurements, so that decisions can be made as new contextualized information becomes available.