Natural hazards pose an increasing threat to society. Processes change in magnitude and frequency; exposures are modified within short time periods, but over large areas and despite increasing knowledge; and damage tolls increase continuously. Therefore, a comprehensive disaster management is indispensable. Within a sustainable management of disasters, the installation of early warning systems is an often required and in some instances a most suitable tool. This session is aimed to present different early warning systems, independent of whether these deal with landslides, floods, tsunamis, earthquakes , droughts or meteorological events, to name a few only, but it gives special attention to tsunami warning systems since these have been responsible of the major catastrophes of the last decade.
This session addresses among others main achievements of and future challenges for the architecture of warning systems. Relevant topics include but are not limited to:
- Integration of heterogeneous sensor systems
- Application of unconventional sensors for situation assessment and damage estimation, e.g. blogs, smartphone apps, and low cost mobile airborne sensors
- Process design of standard operational procedures in warning centres
- Integration of simulation systems for forecasting of processes as well as systematic testing of warning systems
- Message-based coordination of activities of warning centres in a system-of-systems environment, e.g. based on the Common Alerting Protocol (OASIS)
- Concepts of and best practices for the operation of complex multinational warning systems, e.g. utilisation of service level agreements (SLA) and IT Infrastructure Library procedures (ITIL).