Integrated Real Time Geospatial Sensor Web and Visual Analytics for Environmental Decision Support

Abstract

In this paper, we present an integrated Real-Time Geospatial Sensor Web and Visual Analytics systEm (RT-GeoSWAVE), which allows user-driven creation and sensors for real-time situational awareness. We illustrate this cyber-sensing system through a near-real-time urban flooding and sewer overflow scenario in Chicago, where NEXRAD Level II data are converted through a series of spatial, temporal and thematic transformations to a group of persistent polygon-based virtual rainfall sensors at the urban hydrological unit scale (i.e., sewersheds), which in turn can be visualized on demand as a real-time animated movie in space and time on the integrated Web-based Google Earth to assess rainfall patterns in an urban sewershed. Such a system is invaluable for real-time decision support as the spatial distribution of intense rainfall significantly impacts the triggering and behavior of urban flooding and sewer overflows. Furthermore, the system also demonstrates a critical capability for environmental observatories that will enable their users to dynamically evolve a suite of derived data products to meet changing research and management needs. INTRODUCTION This paper presents a system called RT-GeoSWAVE that provides an information system framework for real-time environmental decision making driven by sensor data from environmental observatories. Currently there are a number of large-scale national environmental observatories initiatives in the United States (US) supported by the US National Science Foundation, such as the WATERS (Water and Environmental Research Systems) Network (Montgomery et al. 2007), the Ocean Observatory Initiative (Murphy 2008), and the National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON) (Keller et al. 2008). In addition, there are various sensors and instruments that are already deployed and managed by many Federal, state, and local government agencies, research institutions (Hart and Martinez 2006) and even citizens. For example, the Community Collaborative Rain, Hail, and Snow Network (CoCoRaHS) (http://www.cocorahs.org/) (Cifelli et al. 2005) has participating residential backyard rain gages in all 50 states across the US as of January 2010. The increasing ubiquity of environmental sensor networks and the value of their data for scientific discovery have compelled researchers, such as Hart and Martinez (2006), to 325 World Environmental and Water Resources Congress 2010: Challenges of Change. © 2010 ASCE