An Interoperable Decision Support System for Flood Disaster Response Assistance

For flood monitoring and response, NASA and other agencies are increasingly stepping up to the challenge to harness its remote sensing and modeling resources during an event. As these capabilities are designed and then progressively improved, there is a coupled need for mechanisms to sustain them. There is to date no global decision support system for flood disasters that ingests all the data from existing systems and provides real-time critical information that can guide operational reactions on the ground. Because these capabilities evolve over time, any such interoperable system must incorporate changes and improvements thereof, it must be flexible, and itself robust and able to be maintained into the future. These challenges are addressed in this SBIR where Remote Sensing Solutions collaborates with existing efforts of the Dartmouth Flood Observatory to develop an interoperable one-stop-shop based on open geospatial data standards that unifies information relevant to flood disaster response. Four primary objectives have been defined to achieve this goal (product, i.e. data layer, design; system development; demonstration; commercialization plan). The technical approach to meet the objectives is streamlined into specific work packages, each one including a milestone target to ensure successful project completion.