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Exploitable results
The first and foremost objective of Preview is to develop new or enhanced information services to support the management of risks, mainly intended for the European Civil Protection Units and local or regional authorities.
The selected portfolio of Preview services is first based on the priorities in term of risk to be managed in Europe and in terms of the service to be developed. These priorities have been defined by the community of end-users, and in particular the Civil Protection units, involved in the project.
1. Floods: plain floods, flash floods, northern floods
Floods are one of Europe's most widespread disasters. Major flooding has occurred nearly every year somewhere in our continent during the previous decades. Within Preview, flood hazards are addressed from four angles:
a. medium-range plain flood forecasting and early warning (forecast lead time > 3 days)
The added value of this service is:
- a river-basin-scale forecasting system providing an early flood warning complementary to national systems, and therefore providing a longer lead time for water authorities and civil protection, which increases the available time for crisis preparation;
- use of state-of-the-art weather forecasts, providing an opportunity to describe the uncertainty and spread of the flood forecast, which creates a stronger decision basis for issuing flood alerts as compared to traditional techniques
b. short-range plain flood forecasting (forecast lead time < 3 days) and flood risk management
The added value of the service mainly concerns two points:
- a multitude of information and analysis tools such as water extent maps or accessibility analysis are provided to the user to better estimate the endangered population and potential flood damage;
- an information service which integrates easilly accessible satellite-based and ancillary data for convenient analysis.
c. very-short-range high-resolution flash flood forecasting (forecast lead time < 36 hours)
The service connects two components:
- a flash-flood forecasting system delivering, typically 1 day ahead, forecast atmospheric and hydrological warning products in multiple-standard formats for distribution to users through GIS platforms.
- a specific GIS-based decision-support system that may be used to assess the potential extent of flooded areas and to deliver specific risk-assessment products to end-users.
d. northern flood forecasting (forecast lead time 1 to 10 days).
The added value of this service is:
- operational hydrological probability forecast as a complement for decision-making during a flood situation.
- development of an operational platform of general warning products (with new forecasting products on all timescales from 1 to 10 days) which are suitable for all endusers and can be applied both for the whole region and downscaled to local level.
- end-users have designed forecasting products/services tailored to the existing in-situ infrastructure.
This subdivision takes into account the specific nature of flood-generation processes, different spatial and temporal scales and the respective damage potential. These factors determine the predictability of the different types of flood. Therefore, each flood type is dealt with by a specific flood-warning and flood-response service.
2. Windstorms
Windstorms accounted for half the weather-related damage reported by members of the World Meteorological Organisation in 2003. Windstorms due to Atlantic cyclones are the dominant cause of weather-related deaths and economic losses in the north and west of Europe.
The Preview service provides web-based alerts to potential windstorm events between 1 and 5 days ahead, based on the latest ensemble forecasting techniques, in a user-friendly presentation suitable for both professional weather forecasters and endusers such as civil protection agencies.
Ensemble forecasting allows the user to understand the uncertainty in the forecast and therefore assess risks of windstorm-related damage. By pooling the wind forecasts from Europe's leading ensemble prediction systems at several of the leading national met services in Europe, the system provides better probabilistic guidance than is available from any one individual ensemble system, and gives forecasters all over Europe access to the best possible forecast guidance. Where a higher-than-normal risk of windstorm impact is identified, users are alerted to locations affected by a traffic-light map highlighting enhanced risks.
In addition to the immediate warning service, the windstorm mapping service provides a reference to the long-term climatological risks and frequencies of windstorm events based on an analysis of 45-years of gridded wind analyses.
While it should be noted that the nature of this gridded analysis means it will not resolve details of every major windstorm event, and in particular may miss the maximum intensity of many storms, it does provide a useful reference to the frequency of events in different parts of Europe generated in a consistent fashion.
3. Forest fires: Summer forest fires and winter forest fires
The fire services aim to provide a complete line of products in order to cope with the different aspects of fire risk management from the prevention phase to the post-crisis phase. The Preview services are fully in line with the decision taken by the EU to address risks related to the environment and protection against forest fires. Protection of the environment is one of the major challenges facing Europe, and mitigating forest fires one of the main objectives.
During the prevention phase, fuel parameters services provide information such as fuel type, fuel load and canopy cover to end-users, in particular to design prevention plans or define land management. During the early-warning phase, the need is to monitor fire danger in time and space. Fire danger indices are closely focused on mitigation and anticipation, especially to prepare early warning of operational units (pre-positioning of fire-fighting resources).
Two PREVIEW services cover the operational response stage to monitor fire evolution. The fire monitoring service is intended to provide timely information about the location and characteristics of the fire (power and propagation), while the fire propagator service is a real-time simulator of the progression of the fire.
The fire damage assessment service covers the post-disaster stage. This service aims to quantify the severity of existing fires and characterise damage to vegetation cover. It is a powerful tool for supporting generation of official statistics on forest fire events and design of vegetation recovery plans.
4. Earthquake and volcanoes, landslides
The Preview services aim to deliver an operational warning system based on the coupling of pre-existing thematic information (hazard and geomorphologic maps, monitoring data) with 'near-real-time' data from various sources and technologies; the use of Earth observation (EO) data plays a key role in developing services to support the needs of end-users, both at national and local level. Specific user needs are being targeted and the stakeholders involved are national civil protection agencies and public authorities in charge of landslide risk management at national, regional and local levels.
The Preview services provide a unique framework for:
a. monitoring of deep-seated, slow-moving landslides using remote-sensing interferometric techniques and the integration of diverse information sources and preoperational functions to obtain estimates of landslide risk assessment and hazard zonation;
b. forecasting and early warning of shallow rapid slope movements through the integration of new technologies of meteo-hydrological modelling, radar remote sensing and geophysical methods.
The complete system is based upon a web-GIS environment on a PC platform coupled with physical and empirical models. The two services are making an important contribution to the use of EO data, integrated with other measurements, for civil protection activities concerning forecasting, prevention and warning at global and regional scales. This approach delivers relevant information for the pre-event, event and post-event phases of natural hazards in a variety of physiographical settings.
5. Man-made
Man-made risks are risks caused by human activities, including risks to society from hazardous materials and terrorist threats. The management of hazardous substances and, for example, an emergency with liquefied chlorine or ammonia gases can have fatal consequences if risk prevention is not satisfactory and if the right tools are lacking. Such events are rare, so relying on statistics to plan future emergency response strategies is difficult.
Currently, only a limited number of tools that could potentially deliver such concentration forecasts exist. These are often even cumbersome to use for experts and it may take days to gather the necessary data and make a prediction. Whilst this prediction will be precise, it will not be of use during emergency response. More advanced methods allowing straightforward and timely use by emergency responders would thus be beneficial. Such advanced tools should produce precise, near-real-time concentration forecasts based on in-situ data and weather and terrain observation.
Another observation is that existing dispersion models are deterministic; they calculate a representation of reality based on a set of input parameters without taking the uncertainty of these parameters into account. Therefore, a single representation of reality is computed, that will not reflect the true outcome of an event. A probabilistic concentration forecast based on ensemble modelling, as is already in use for weather prediction, will therefore yield a more useful decision-making tool in the field. This tool must also become integrated with the command-and-control tools commonly used in emergency response.
Since ensemble modelling has already been developed for large-scale dispersion prediction in the event of releases from nuclear facilities, developments in Preview are attempting to downscale these tools so that they are useful for responding to chemical releases, which are on the smaller meso-scales and obviously even on a local scale. The services in this document are defined for risk management applications that require concentration forecasts on a local (<10 km) scale.
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