Recommended (Best) Practice

This document proposes a set of best practices and guidelines for implementing and using the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) Web Map Service (WMS) to serve maps which are time-dependent or elevation-dependent. In particular, clarifications and restrictions on the use of WMS are defined to allow unambiguous and safe interoperability between clients and servers, in the context of expert meteorological and oceanographic usage and non-expert usage in other communities.

Overview:

Storm surges and tidal waves are global phenomena that considerably affect human populations in coastal and island regions. According to the Guide to Storm Surge Forecasting published by the World Meteorological Organization in 2011, storm surges can be defined as “oscillations of the water level in a coastal or inland body of water in the time range of a few minutes to a few days, resulting from forcing from atmospheric weather systems. According to this definition, the so-called wind waves, which have durations on the order of several seconds, are excluded”.

This practice is devoted to the use of SAR satellite imagery for flood mapping. The practice shows the use of ESA's SNAP software for pre-processing and processing of SAR imagery using a threshold method for deriving the flood extent. Google Earth is used to visualize the results of image processing. This practice was developed by the Space Research Institute NASU-SSAU, Ukraine.

Overview:

Remote sensing technologies can support all stages of the disaster management cycle. In the prevention and preparedness phases, they often find their application in risk assessments, scenario modelling and early warning. This UN-SPIDER Recommended Practice explains how remote sensing data about recurring floods, information about infrastructure and socio-economic data can be integrated using free and open source software to support prevention and preparedness efforts.

Objective: 

The objective of this practice is to identify the extent of a flood as well as the affected infrastructure such as roads and settlements and impaired areas of interest for example agricultural regions. This information can be used by disaster management agencies and other stakeholders to undertake the rescue and relief activities in affected areas.

Overview:

Mapping the extent of a natural hazard (e.g., assessing areas with a high risk) or disaster is a first step in disaster risk management and emergency response. Subsequently, exposure mapping enables the estimation of the impact of hazards or disasters, for example, regarding the number of affected inhabitants or infrastructure. The following practice shows the use of Quantum GIS to analyze a disaster extent map in combination with auxiliary data such as population or land cover data.

This document proposes a set of best practices and guidelines for implementing and using the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) Web Map Service (WMS) to serve maps which are members of an ensemble of maps, each of which is a valid possible alternative for the same time and location. In the meteorological and oceanographic communities, it is Best Practice to produce a large number of simultaneous forecasts, whether for a short range of hours, a few days, seasonal or climatological predictions. These ensembles of forecasts indicate the probability distributions of specific outcomes.

Overview:

Flood hazard assessments are critical to identifying areas at risk and taking relevant preparation and mitigation measures to address the hazard. Using the HEC-RAS 2D model for preparing flood hazard maps, this Recommended Practice explains how to identify flood-prone areas and exposed infrastructure. Through its focus on the prevention and mitigation stages of the disaster management cycle, it complements the Recommended Practice on Flood Mapping and Damage Assessment with Sentinel-2, also developed by SUPARCO.