The National Weather Service (NWS) is in the midst of a multi-billion dollar modernization program that will provide very timely, accurate mesoscale weather data in Weather Forecast Offices (WFOs) nationwide. While local area high-resolution weather data can be extremely valuable for emergency preparedness, emergency management agencies typically lack the meteorological expertise and computing capabilities to process advanced weather information. Thus, in association with its modernization program, the Forecast Systems Laboratory (FSL) has developed a Local Data Acquisition and Dissemination System that includes a WWW based weather dissemination system. This development effort includes conducting experiments to determine the use of advanced meteorological information by local government operations. Local emergency preparedness agencies (including emergency preparedness, sheriff, and police departments) can benefit greatly from appropriate information about local weather hazards. The LDAD WWW Dissemination system uses high-resolution weather datasets produced by AWIPS. The system computes and displays assertions, weather characteristics related to spatial (regions) and temporal (periods) objects such as river basins and storm evolution.

The LDAD Project demonstrates this concept through the development of the LDAD Emergency Management Dissemination System . This system consists of an LDAD Server (LS) which serves display workstations located at local EM Operations centers and the public. The LDAD Server is the sole local external link to the AWIPS systems in the local weather forecast office. It retrieves the data from the local WFO to be distributed to the display workstations. Along with the group of emergency preparedness users called general users, the system will serve another class of users called expert users. These users could be from organizations that have expertise in particular fields such as the Urban Drainage and Flood Control District (UDFCD) of Denver which has expertise in flooding. The expert users will utilize the data that resides in the community server, add value to it using their expertise, and return a much more valuable product to the Community Server which will then be available to the class of general users. The LDAD Server also serves as a storage for all the GIS and other datasets used by the display workstations.

LDAD Dissemination follows a simple technique to achieve its objective: take weather information from the local WSFO, GIS information from local sources, and action rules from the emergency manager's warning plans; and combine them to generate a set of displays that are condensed, coherent, information for the EM in a language that s/he speaks. The project's development methodology is to build weather decision support systems, install these systems at various evaluation sites, get feedback from real users, and repeat the cycle again.

Please look at the What's New link to check out changes to the system.

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Last updated 30 Aug 00