DISSEMINATION OF WEATHER INFORMATION TO EMERGENCY MANAGERS - A DECISION-SUPPORT TOOL

Since 1992, the Dissemination Project has been conducting experiments at the Forecast Systems Laboratory in Boulder, CO, to determine the us e of advanced meteorological information by local government operation s, Local emergency preparedness agencies (involving sheriff and police departments) can gain great benefit from appropriate information abou t weather hazards. The Dissemination Project employs a workstation spe cially designed to focus on four weather hazards: flash floods, fire d anger, severe weather, and disruptive winter storms, The system uses h igh-resolution weather data sets produced by analysis and prediction m odels, as well as the WSR-88D radar, which provides mesoscale derail a bout rainfall distribution that is mot available from rain-gauge netwo rks. Specific to the workstation is MeteoAssert, a subsystem that extr acts weather assertions from gridded dal-a using territory, time, and parameter models and organizes them into descriptions-coherent chunks of related assertions. Both the original data sets and the assertions are visualized on different media: images, maps, graphs, tables, text, and sound, The first application developed on the workstation was the Basin Rainfall Monitoring System, designed to assist emergency manage rs in evaluating flash-flood situations.