About the Author:  Sean Gorman founded FortiusOne in 2005 to bring location based analytics to the mass market. Sean brings over 10 years of experience at the forefront of the geospatial revolution as a researcher, practitioner, and entrepreneur at FortiusOne. Through both academic and entreprenurial efforts he has been working to make geographic data more accessible to the public since 1997 culminating in the creation of GeoCommons – a crowd-sourced repository of statistical data and social feeds that can be easily mapped, remixed and reused by non-technical users. Sean has been featured in media such as, Wired, Der Spiegel, ABC, Washington Post, Business 2.0, MSNBC, CBS and CNN. He also holds a PhD. From George Mason University in Public Policy where he was the Provost’s High Potential Scholar and was the recipient of the Fischer Prize. He has published dozens of articles on geographic data sharing and analysis, and authored the book Networks, Complexity and Security: The Role of Public Policy in Critical Infrastructure Protection. Read more from this author

With the threat of Gustav increasing to a Category 4 hurricane we’ve been working on getting storm surge and wave height prediction data loaded into GeoCommons (many thanks to Raj for leading this up). According to CNN, FEMA’s models has predicted “4.5 million people will be in the storm’s path and 59,953 buildings will be destroyed. The path also ensnares about 170 hospitals and more than 1,100 police and fire stations….resulting in $29.3 billion dollars in damage.”

One of the big motivations for developing Geocommons was our experience doing emergency response work during Hurricane Katrina. Models like those conveyed in the CNN report were not shared in a manner that made the results actionable to those on the ground. Knowing that a storm surge is going to hit and do damage is one thing, knowing if that storm surge is going to specifically hit you or your assets. The Federal government creates the data but does a terrible job of sharing it in a manner that makes it personalized and actionable (our attempt at recommending fixes).

The concept is simple – if I was a local first responder responsible for managing shelters it would be very useful to know – is there a risk of my shelters being under water? If I was the electric power company – are any of my substations going to be under water? You can fill several pages with similar examples, but none of them can be answered if the data is not shared in a means that allows those responding to use the data.

To this end we’ve posted storm surge and wave height prediction data from NOAA onto GeoCommons, so that you can accomplish some of these simple but critical tasks. If you download the data in Google Earth you can have a map like the one below is a few seconds showing areas that are predicted to have a storm surge between 10 and 15+ feet.

You can also download the data as a “shapefile” for GIS analysis and do some more sophisticated mapping like the image below showing the storm surge impact in relation to energy infrastructure assets:

Using Maker! you can also do some lightweight analysis with the data:

Then you can add data on assets that could be impacted the threat. In the Maker! map below I added facilities regulated by the EPA that could be effected by the storm surge:

Looks like there is an Entergy facility that could potentially be dealing with a 21 ft storm surge.

All the datasets are available on Finder! tagged as “Gustav” and we’ll be adding more over the weekend and as the situation evolves:

Gustav Storm surge of 1ft or less

Gustav Storm surge of 2ft

Gustav Storm surge of 3 to 5 ft

Gustav Storm surge of 5 to 10 ft

Gustav Storm surge of 10 to 15 ft

Gustav Storm surge of 15 ft or more

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