Applying Environmental Data to Aid Decision Making During Hazardous Weather Events

Observations Necessary for Aiding Local Emergency Response via Telecommunications (ONALERT) is a multi-agency effort bringing together the expertise of the National Weather Service (NWS), the Oklahoma Climatological Survey (OCS) and NOAA’s Forecast Systems Laboratory (FSL) in the areas of analysis, forecast and warning generation, and adaptation of critical forecast information for efficient and appropriate use by emergency management personnel. ONALERT is being developed with the goal of serving as an experimental national prototype for the dissemination of weather data and products to emergency managers, and for the training of emergency managers on how to apply the data correctly in their decision-making processes. The lessons learned during the training and operational phases of highly succesful OK-FIRST project will be applied to better synthesize the local products developed by OCS and the text and graphical forecast products developed by both OCS and FSL. These products are formatted for delivery via the NWS Advanced Weather Interactive Processing System (AWIPS) Local Data Acquisition and Dissemination (LDAD) system. The function of LDAD is to acquire local data sets of varying types and communication means, perform quality control on the incoming data, and disseminate modernized weather data and information to external users including emergency managers of local and state government agencies. This presentation will report on the initial field implementation of the ONALERT decision support system.