Disaster Pilot 2023

For more information please contact innovation@ogc.org

Disaster Pilot 2023 Call for Participation is here (PDF). Note: proposal submissions go here. Deadline for submissions extended to Monday 20 February @ 11:59 PM EST.

Missed the Q&A session on February 1? Catch up with the session recording. Further questions may be posted to the Additional Message textbox in the OGC Innovation Program Contact Form.

Building on the success and outcomes of the Disaster Resilience Pilot, Disaster Pilot 2021, and subsequent preparatory activities,  OGC is now preparing to execute Disaster Pilot 2023. A key output from previous efforts has been recognition and acknowledgement of the need to address:

 

Vision

Disasters occur all the time, but many types of disaster are occurring more frequently, more severely, and in more regions than ever before.  Disasters and disaster impacts are increasingly complex and consequential. Drought, high winds, and extreme heat drive wildfire occurrence, leaving hillsides vulnerable to landslides in subsequent storm events. Health disasters such as pandemics, exacerbated by respiratory diseases (caused for example by those same wildfires) increase population vulnerability and hinder response efforts. All of this is being thrown into a higher gear in more places by the energy effects of climate change and global warming.

 At the same time, earth observation data, whether collected from space, measured by in situ sensors, reported by authorities, or captured by a volunteer’s cellphone, are available in almost unimaginable volume, velocity, and variety, supplemented by large and small scale predictive models and other analytical / interpretive tools. The challenge we face is to work collaboratively with this data to produce information that directly guides those in the field and on the ground to improve disaster prediction, resilience, response, and recovery. 

Our vision is to use spatial data sharing standards together with Web technologies and cloud computing so that the responsible stakeholders can work together wherever they are located, use relevant data wherever they are stored, and manage every phase of a disaster at any scale wherever it threatens. In a global, cloud-scale disaster information ecosystem, awareness of threats, vulnerabilities, and impacts can be fostered and shared through joint development of workflow recipes that integrate and transform analysis-ready observation and prediction data (ARD) into decision ready indicators (DRI). Indicator workflows, ready to run and adaptable to each situation,  provide the guidance that the right people at the right time in the right place need to make decisions, take actions, and improve disaster outcomes.

Pilot Scope

The Pilot’s technical scope involves a key set of stakeholder collaborations, distributed information technologies, EO advancements, and related standards:

  1. Data to Decision Workflow Collaboration and Realization: Hybrid applications-to-the-data EO cloud exploitation platforms that seamlessly bring analysis-ready imagery, in situ, social, economic, environmental, health, and other data streams into scalable cloud environments where advanced processing, modeling, and algorithms can be directly and flexibly applied to them.
  2. ARD and DRI Services: assessing and validating analysis readiness, then integrating remote, local, and framework data sources on demand, with the goal of providing targeted information products to local analysts and field responders through modern convenience API’s, optimized hybrid-cloud services, and scaleable mobile-ready applications.
  3. Immersive visualization of Key Indicators in Time, Space, and What If Scenarios: Immersive and interactive visualizations of 3D-4D disaster and related indicators in contextual environments that overcome conceptual and perceptual barriers to understanding disaster risks, vulnerabilities, and impacts, particularly over longer time scales.

(It’s) The People

While many of the objectives of an OGC Pilot are technical, effective organizational and personal collaborations, as well as social, economic, and political context, are just as important. In disaster management and response situations, physical analysis and synthesis centers have often been shown to foster critical exchanges of knowledge and effective plans for action, providing the rapid feedback loops required for timely decisions. The Pilot will include a series of workshops and other outreach activities intended to involve initiative stakeholders — sponsors, participants, practitioners, and other collaborators — in designing, exercising, and evaluating the technical capabilities that the Pilot will prototype. These activities will also examine approaches to reproducing the effectiveness of physical synthesis centers in a distributed environment by leveraging virtual collaboration tools that have become both necessary and remarkably effective in recent times.

Concepts

Schedule

Building on the success and outcomes of the Disaster Resilience PilotDisaster Pilot 2021, and subsequent preparatory activities, OGC is now preparing to execute Disaster Pilot 2023, focusing on drought and wildland fire hazards. Additional threads may be added to the schedule in the future, depending on funding availability.

Contact Sara Saeedi or  Josh Lieberman for further information.

Milestone Date Activity
M01 19 January, 2023 Call for Participation Release
M02 1 February, 2023 Question & Answer Session (Recording is available here)
M03 20 February, 2023 Responses Due (11:59PM EST)
M04 3 March, 2023 Participant Selection and Agreements
M05 15-16 March, 2023 Pilot Kick-Off Meeting
M06 26-27 April, 2023 Workshop 1: Stakeholder Workflow Collaboration
M07 28-29 June, 2023 Workshop 2: Decision Ready Operations (Manitoba)
M08 18 August, 2023 Draft Pilot Report and Demonstrators
M09 8 September, 2023 Draft Pilot Report and Demonstrators
 M10 27 September 2023 Final Pilot Demonstration
M11 14-15 November 2023  Pilot Report, Demonstrators & Video Public Release

 

Tags:

Climate Change, Digital Twins, Disaster Resilience, Drought, Epidemic, Flood, Mudslide, Pandemic, Spatial Data Infrastructure, Wildfire

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