The relationship between weather and emergency management (not to mention emergency preparedness) is fundamental and can be quite complicated. Weather causes many of the disasters that require an emergency response, yet awareness of conditions is essential for management of incidents unrelated to weather as the cause. For sure, meteorological awareness can have a profound effect managing the extent of destruction to life and property to a manmade or natural disaster or incident. While weather awareness is critical for incident response and mitigation, it is also a key attribute in scenario planning as part of emergency preparedness processes.
More and more we are hearing about weather as part of the situational awareness equation across emergency management, but also fire and policing. It’s the need for weather data that comes to the decision-maker versus an incident manager having to stop everything and go hunt for this data and then mentally connect the dots per impact on a response plan. Weather data needs to be a part of the situational awareness “fabric” that includes real-time awareness and notification, but also leveraging weather data as part of multi-sensor fusion and stream analytics that help derive meaning and impacts for the incident commander.
The horrific structural collapse at the Champlain Towers in Miami is an example where the event wasn’t necessarily caused by weather, but during the response weather disrupted search and recovery operations because of the approaching Tropical Storm Elsa. Emergency managers and incident commanders found themselves making split second decisions as the storm approached the area. Decisions that involved responder safety, but also potential impacts on:
- Additional structural damage from fast-rising or swift-moving water.
- Disruptions to utility services.
- Damage to infrastructure, such as roads and bridges, with an impact on response.
- Rescues, removals and recoveries from flooded areas or under swift-water conditions.
Blueforce is pleased to announce the beta availability of our new HyperLocal Weather Plugin for BlueforceEDGE. V1 of this new micro-service plugin has been implemented to provide near real-time reporting of proximate weather data (based on the LAT/LON of where BlueforceEDGE is running) and has been implemented as follows:
- Extensible: V1 ships with support for tomorrow.io and will be extended to support other providers over time.
- Dynamic Query: The plugin queries for hyperlocal weather based on where the MEC and or BlueforceEDGE is installed
- Inter-process Messaging Interface: The plugin supports Blueforce inter-process messaging, where plugins can “talk” to each other for sensor fusion, sensor cueing, and as an interface for stream analytics and multi-variant threat detection.
V1 supports the following weather data which can be queried at intervals ranging from 1 minute to 60 minutes:
- Temperature
- Humidity
- Wind Speed
- Wind Direction
- Cloud Base (for aviation ops)
- Cloud Cover
- Precipitation Probability
For more information, email us at info@blueforcedev.com, or visit our Contact Me page to request a demo.