A4CAT. A plataform for weather-related risk events management

Abstract

In the framework of the EU funded research project under the H2020 framework programme ANYWHERE (Enhancing emergency management and response to extreme weather and climate events) a system to integrate both hazard and vulnerability information has been developed. Out of 6 pilot projects for 6 different locations in Europe, In the application to Catalunya, A4CAT has been developed in this thesis work, it processes real time observations from different networks (sensors, weather radars etc). A4CAT (ANYWHERE for Catalunya), a web-based platform has been developed by considering the diverse weather conditions of Catalunya, including special type of warnings and observations related to the landscape of Catalunya like forest-fires, sea storms, wind, heat waves, air quality, floods and the general warnings like, rivers, rain, snow. A4CAT is an advanced web-based decision support system for managing, simulating, and forecasting natural hazards to make intelligent decisions in realtime for extreme weather events. For Catalunya, almost all types of weather conditions are observed by the input of Catalunya’s meteocat and civil protection agencies and their respective hazard warning inputs are included in this system. A4CAT handles the management of all the hazard warnings on the front-end, communicates with the A4EU back-end for the retrievel, updation and synchronization of information related to the weather warnings in real time and helps in responding effectively to such warnings.