An integrated meteorological monitoring and display system for emergency response

The Atmospheric Technologies Group (ATG) of Westinghouse Savannah River Company (WSRC) developed and presently operates a network of meteorological observation towers (Parker and Addis, 1993) that provide timely, accurate real-time meteorological data for a variety of uses including emergency response to unplanned atmospheric releases and near-term weather forecasts. In 1996, a Mutual Aid Agreement between the US Department of Energy-Savannah River (DOE-SR), WSRC, and the Local Emergency Planning Committee (LEPC) and Emergency Management Agency of Augusta/Richmond County Georgia was created to provide real-time meteorological monitoring and emergency modeling information in hazardous materials corridors beyond the boundary of the Savannah River Site (SRS) near Aiken, South Carolina. Under the agreement ATG is responsible for the incorporation of monitoring sites beyond the SRS into an integrated meteorological monitoring system for emergency response. The LEPC partially funded the resources and monitoring sites by contributions supplied by member companies. The DOE-SR funded the development by ATG.

The resulting meteorological monitoring and display system incorporates many facets including data collection, handling, display, and storage. For data collection, ATG decided on a data logger based system that utilizes a remote polling function to retrieve data from individual monitoring sites. Polling is conducted over dedicated phone circuits or modems every 15 minutes, and data becomes available to the user minutes thereafter. Data are permanently stored in a relational database that can be accessed through a graphical user interface or directly by emergency response models. Non-SRS locations can access the previous 12 hours of data via the Internet using the file-transfer protocol (FTP).

A suite of products has been developed for the user to easily use the accessed data. Graphical support includes specialized GIS background maps, graphical user interfaces (GUI's) for data display, and spatial plotting displays for data and model output. Emergency response modeling capabilities include a set of user selectable release points or a mouse-selectable location, an extensive chemical database, and color-coded concentration projections. Real-time spatial plots of meteorological data are available as is a means of accessing archived data including time series plots.