Abstract

The 2007 hurricane season has already produced two category five storms which made landfall in Central America. Following each storm emergency responders were given access to numerous data resources that enabled them to make decisions based on accurate and timely visual representations of the situation during and subsequent to the storms. Through the SERVIR project NASA, NOAA and other government and private organizations have worked together to create satellite and in-situ data products for the region of Mesoamerica. These data products have been available via on-line repositories for over three years. With new 3D technologies provided by Google Earth and NASA's WorldWind it is now very easy to display, animate and compare imagery products on a 3D virtual globe. These tools were utilized in the recent hurricane Dean and Felix events to give emergency responders, as well as scientists and the local population information critical to their needs in an easy to comprehend format. The imagery products included GOES imagery, updated at 30 minute intervals, daily MODIS products, post event flood maps and land change maps. These could be overlaid with the output of weather models such as MM5 and WRF to show wind speed, wind direction, precipitation rates and many other parameters. The model outputs also provided short term (24-36 hour) predictions as well. All this information was made available via the web. This presentation will describe the emergency procedures that were taken as the storms approached and the usage of Geobrowsers to convey critical information to the emergency responders and other personnel.