New cloud-based tool to Dynamically Manage Urban Resilience: the Fresnel Platform for Greater Paris

As cities are put under greater pressure from the threat of impacts of climate change, in particular the risk of heavier rainfall and flooding, there is a growing need to establish a hierarchical form of resilience in which critical infrastructures can become sustainable. The main difficulty is that geophysics and urban dynamics are strongly nonlinear with an associated, extreme variability over a wide range of space-time scales.

The polarimetric X-band radar at the ENPC’s campus (East of Paris) introduced a paradigm change in the prospects of environmental monitoring in Ile-de France. The radar is operated since May 2015 and has several characteristics that makes it of central importance for the environmental monitoring of the region.

Based on the radar data and other scientific mesurement tools, the platform for greater Paris was developped in participative co-creation, and in scientific collaboration with the world leader industrial in water management. As the need for data accessibility, a fast and reliable infrastructure were major requirements from the scientific community, the platform was build as a cloud-based solution. It provides scientific weather specialists, as well as water manager,  a fast and steady platform accessible from their web browser on desktop and mobile displays.

It was developped using free and open sources librairies, it is rooted on an integrated suite of modular components based on an asynchronous event-driven JavaScript runtime environment. It includes a comprehensive and (real-time) accessible database and also provides tools to analyse historical data on different time and geographic scales around the greater Paris.

The Fresnel SaaS (Sofware as a Service) cloud-based platform is an example of nowadays IT tools to dynamically enhance urban resilience. Developments are still in progress, in constant request and feedback loops from the scientific and professional world.