Rapid Scaling of Sensitive Information Sharing to Support NWS Alaska During the Spring 2020 Ice Breakup Season

Abstract:

During the Spring 2020 ice breakup season in Alaska, National Weather Service (NWS) flights to assess ice jams and flooding were impacted due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Through JPSS rapid-response COVID-19 support to NWS in Alaska, a novel approach was taken to provide the needed data and images to perform hydrologic analyses and issue flood watches and warnings to safeguard the citizens of Alaska. GeoCollaborate^®, a SBIR Phase III real-time, cross-platform data sharing and collaboration platform, was used to rapidly enable the combination and sharing of various key datasets, satellite and flood products, images, and video footage. These included JPSS flood products, Sentinel-2 SAR data provided by the NWS National Water Center, real-time NWS watches and warning products, photographs taken by civil air patrol, contractors and NWS employees in-flight, Riverwatch reports, images, and video.

COVID-19 provided the opportunity to rapidly put innovation to work and collaboratively bring together datasets from disparate sources to immediately enable product validation and verification from satellites, aircraft and citizen reports. This can greatly reduce the amount of time NWS hydrologists spend, upwards of 45%, looking for relevant datasets to support their river ice monitoring mission.

This presentation will identify the products accessed and show examples of pulling together disparate datasets from different locations thus leveraging data as a strategic asset to improve situational awareness and decision making. JPSS is supporting StormCenter Communications through its Fire & Smoke and River, Ice & Flooding initiatives to deliver more NOAA and other trusted data through GeoCollaborate. Additional and broad applications exist to support other Proving Ground activities, internal NOAA and external partner organizations, GEO and CEOS priorities.