environmental response management application (erma): from portsmouth response to noaa's...
DESCRIPTION
In 2007, a small UNH team put together a prototype emergency response web application using open source tools on a Mac Desktop and later a Mac Mini. That system, called Portsmouth Response, was designed to assist in the first hours of an environmental incident by providing easy access to basic GIS layers without requiring GIS experts. This system generalized and renamed to ERMA, begin deployed as prototypes in the Caribbean and participating in the Spill Of National Significance (SONS) drill in New England during March 2010. Before the team could evaluate the performance during the SONS drill, the Deepwater Horizon platform exploded in the Gulf of Mexico on April 20, 2010. Four days later, the ERMA team was called in for 24x7 support of NOAA and USCG operations to handle the incident. ERMA went from prototype system to being the system providing the Common Operational Picture (COP) is just a few weeks. In early June, NOAA setup a system to mirror the unrestricted datasets for the public on the GeoPlatform system. The presentation describes how ERMA is designed and how it was used during the Deepwater Horizon oil spill incident.TRANSCRIPT
ERMAPortsmouth Response to
Deepwater Horizon
Kurt Schwehr
24-Sep-2010
GCN Award
NOAA's ERMA/GeoPlatform Wins Award (OR&R)
GeoPlatform, powered by NOAA's Environmental Response Management Application (ERMA), has won a Government Computer News Award. GeoPlatform was instrumental in the government's Deepwater Horizon oil spill response and restoration efforts. During the crisis, NOAA scaled up the capabilities of ERMA — a geographic information system tool that on its own could not handle the magnitude of the response — to handle more than 600 data layers and feeds, many of them updated in real time. The resulting GeoPlatform site's data ranges from oil spill trajectories to wildlife observations to the locations of research and response vessels. In addition to providing a common picture for all response organizations, the project potentially saved millions of dollars that would have been spent on a new solution. GeoPlatform/ERMA will be one of 20 projects honored at a ceremony in Virginia on Oct. 27.
Credits
Rob Braswell, Allison Bailey, Jordan Chadwick, Phil Collins, ChanderGanesan, Stanley Glidden, George Graettinger, Michael Greer, Michele Jacobi, Nancy Kinner, Steven Knight, Bob St. Lawrence, Kathy Mandsager, Amy Merten, Aaron Racicot, Tracy Ross, Kari Sheets, Ben Shorr, Dane Springmeyer
And many others from NOAA (especially OR&R, nowCoast, WOC), USCG, UNH (CRRC, CCOM, Morse Hall, …), and many more
Acknowledgement of Funding / Conflict of Interest
• Received approximately $65K from BP in 2004 for work on the Santa Barbara Basin slope failures
• Spent time at sea with BP staff
• Taken the Exxon Sedimentary Basin Analysis training
Back in 2006…
Spill Coordinator:
“We call them on the VHF radio every 15-30 minutes”
How do you track your ships and assets during a spill?
???
Setting
The typical situation… a ship spilling oil
MISLE
Marine Information for Safety and Law Enforcement
Traditional Oil Spill – Exxon Valdez
CoscoBusan7-Nov-2007
CoscoBusan
CoscoBusan and the tug Revolution
CoscoBusan, Nov 2007
Trouble close to homeLNG vessel adrift off Boston
11-12 Feb 2008
Can we evaluate the risk?
Despite risk analysis and planning…
bad things WILL happen
When things go wrong…
How will we respond?
The unjoy of PDFs
Solution?
Provide a flexible system to assist in the first few hours
COP
EPA web system
Environmental Response Management Application
ERMA Data Flow
Open Source Tools / Open Protocols
• OpenLayers• Open Street Map (OSM)• gdal/ogr• Mapserver• FeatureServer• PostgreSQL / PostGIS• Apache/Django• noaadata/libais for ship tracking• Trac/SVN/git/Python/Perl/Fink/Debian Linux• Nagios• IRC – irc.freenode.net
The ability to hire component authors
• Chris Schmidt, author of OpenLayers and FeatureServer, wrote a Django interface to my AIS database.
ERMA ArchitectureFor Rapid Response
Initial prototype – Our backyard
Portsmouth Response
Slide of Cocheco
Critical datasets for environmental response
Tides
Can we scale this to multiple sites?
Caribbean – Puerto Rico
Can we transition ERMA to NOAA and participate in national drills?
Spill of National Significance (SONS)
New England, March 2010
“Hotwash” – We were not ready
• Faking data is difficult
• Location names caused trouble
• Little to no use of charts or the Coast Pilot
• Which vessels were involved? Few had AIS
• IT issues – printing challenges and overloaded wifi
• Communication was dominated by rumors and note passing like in high schools (before texting)
• Field personnel need mobile data input devices
Deepwater Horizon Explodes
20 Apr 2010
25 Apr 2010
Raster Chart
Where does the live data come from?NOAA, USCG, Navy, EPA
(Through a team of NOAA open source contractors and UNH)
• NAIS feed to Kurt’s libais C++ parser
• GeoRSS
• KML with ExtendedData
• GeoJSON
• WMS – Web Mapping Service
Rutgers University Coastal Ocean Observation Lab
Rutgers University Coastal Ocean Observation Lab
GeoRSS
AIS Receive Stations
Challenges of knowing which ships
Welcome to the parking lot
Can we release NAIS data in real time
to the public???
Answer 1: Absolutely no way
Can we release NAIS data in real time
to the public???
Answer 1: Absolutely no way
Answer 2: Admiral Allen says
“release it right now”
Spot
NOS nowCOAST Web Map Service (WMS) Supporting ERMA/GeoPlatform
nowCoast
Integrity MonitoringCCOM is watching
Nagios Tracking of System Status
What about community contributions?
Simile Timeline
Jim Meyers – oilspillstats.com
http://oilspillstats.com
Are we ready for another oil spill as a community?
Probably
(for now)
Where to next?
Mobile devices
Tablets, Cells, and other Mobile/Touch devices
Where to next?
Mobile devicesCommand and Control
IMO AIS Binary Message – Area NoticeRTCM and IMO Circular 289
Where to next?
Mobile devicesCommand and Control
Better background data sets
Bathymetric Attributed Grids
Gulf of Mexico
Where to next?
Mobile devicesCommand and Control
Better background data setsTraining, testing and continual vigilance
collaboration
Thanks for listening!
URLs
http://github.com/schwehr
http://schwehr.org/blog
http://geoplatform.gov
http://www.delicious.com/goatbar/deepwaterhorizon