27 June 2008
U.S. Agencies Unveil New Storm-Prediction Tool for Central America
NextStorm gives short-notice warning of thunderstorms, lightning, heavy rains
Washington -- Port, aviation and emergency-management operations will benefit this summer when NextStorm, a new short-notice prediction tool for thunderstorms, lightning and heavy rains, goes operational in Central America and southern Mexico.
The project, led by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and NASA, is also a shared effort of the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the University of Alabama-Huntsville and the Water Center for the Humid Tropics of Latin America and the Caribbean (CATHALAC) in Panama City, Panama.
NextStorm will become part of a satellite-based project called SERVIR -- the Spanish acronym for Regional Visualization and Monitoring System -- a high-tech satellite system that has been monitoring the environment of Central America, parts of Mexico and the Dominican Republic since 2005.
SERVIR technology is developed and tested at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama. SERVIR's supercomputer at CATHALAC integrates data from U.S. and other satellite resources and displays a real-time map of crisis points.
At a glance, decision makers can see where rain will fall, where flooding will occur, and the location of forest fires, hurricanes and tornadoes. CATHALAC then warns residents.
“So far,” USAID assistant administrator Jacqueline Schafer said during a June 24 briefing in Geneva, “SERVIR has been used to access forest fires and ecological changes as well as to respond to severe events such as red tides that affect fisheries, tropical storms, flooding and air pollution.”
NEXTSTORM
Over the next two months, NextStorm will be added to SERVIR’s set of tools.
NextStorm uses an algorithm -- a set of computer instructions -- developed at the University of Alabama, and imagery from NOAA’s Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite, to identify clouds that are likely to evolve into thunderstorms within an hour so warnings can be issued.
“In regions without access to Doppler weather radar,” Schafer said, “such forecasting will be extremely useful for the aviation industry, for port operations, for the ecotourism industry, for emergency management agencies and for those who work outdoors in farming, construction and fisheries.”
Doppler radar measures air and rain movement to help forecasters predict tornadoes and thunderstorms.
The NextStorm system, said NOAA Administrator Conrad Lautenbacher, “makes use of the latest technology from satellites to provide warnings -- to give people at least a 30-minute and hopefully an hour in some cases -- for severe weather events that have never been able to be forecast in these areas before.”
SERVIR AFRICA
USAID, NOAA, NASA and partners are also working in Nairobi, Kenya, with the Regional Center for Mapping of Resources for Development (RCMRD) to establish a SERVIR system for East African countries.
SERVIR Africa will include Next Storm and newer tools that are in development for early warning of flooding and climate-related diseases like Rift Valley fever, and for mapping climate-change projections.
“So far,” Schafer said, “14 members of the RCMRD may access the NextStorm and SERVIR tools. That includes Botswana, Comoros, Ethiopia, Kenya, Lesotho, Malawi, Mauritius, Namibia, Somalia, Sudan, Swaziland, Tanzania, Uganda and Zambia.”
South Africa has worked with RCMRD but is not yet a contracted member state, she added.
SERVIR also takes a global approach to environmental challenges by supporting the 10-year plan for implementing the Global Earth Observation System of Systems, called GEOSS, which has been adopted by more than 70 governments and the European Commission. (See “Benefits Arise from Global Effort To Link Earth Observation Data.”)
The GEOSS network of data providers will develop tools over the next decade to better use the enormous investment countries have made in collecting observations from around the Earth -- everything from satellite-based images and on-the-ground measurements of water flow to biodiversity patterns and health trends.
“The world is complicated,” Lautenbacher said. “It’s a system of systems, not just one item here and one item there. It’s basically science without borders. Nature doesn’t work just on the land or in the sea or in the atmosphere, so our understanding of the planet requires an integrated understanding of how these links work together. You can’t do it with snapshot assessments, you can’t do it from individual countries, you have to do it together.”
More information about SERVIR is available at the program Web site.
