GeoWeather™ Solutions Comes of Age: A GIS/Weather Decision Support System and its Value to Decision Makers

It is well known that weather affects almost all events and operations. Also well known is that adverse weather events (tornados, floods, etc) cause millions of dollars of damage annually in the United States. The NWS Modernization represents a $4.5B investment in modernizing the Nation's capability to observe and forecast the weather. Prior to making this investment, NOAA commissioned a study with the NTIS (then National Bureau of Standards) to determine the losses that could be prevented if more accurate observations and forecasts were available. The study, recently revalidated, showed over $14B in losses were preventable each year across eight market sectors (e.g., transportation, utilities). One of the goals of any GIS/Weather Decision Support System (DSS) and its application to Emergency Management, must be to enable decision makers to factor in real-time, sensible weather information, as a layer, in a truly integrated environment.

GeoWeather™ Solutions fuses GIS and weather technologies. The approach is not simply to overlay weather maps on a GIS background, although it does that as well. Rather, it is to use the power of the underlying GIS database to query those assets most affected by the environment and notify the critical decision maker. A key to the approach is to leverage the literally billions of dollars already invested in GIS systems and related databases