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Enhancing natural hazards data discovery with visual media
Heather L. McCullough (1), Evan McQuinn (2), Jesse Varner (2)
(1) NOAA National Geophysical Data Center, (2) CIRES
Photographs and other visual media provide valuable pre- and post-event data for natural hazards. Scientific research, mitigation, and forecasting rely on visual data for post-analysis, inundation mapping and historic records. Instrumental data only reveal a portion of the whole story; photographs explicitly illustrate the physical and societal impacts from the event. Visual data is rapidly increasing as the availability of portable high resolution cameras and video recorders becomes more attainable. Incorporating these data into archives ensures a more complete historical account of events.
Integrating natural hazards data, such as tsunami, earthquake and volcanic eruption events, socio-economic information, and tsunami deposits and runups along with images and photographs enhances event comprehension. Global historic databases at NOAA's National Geophysical Data Center (NGDC) consolidate these data, providing the user with easy access to a network of information.
NGDC's Natural Hazards Image Database (ngdc.noaa.gov/hazardimages) was recently improved to provide a more efficient and dynamic user interface. Built on the Grails web framework, the site utilizes a number of JavaScript interface components to make browsing hazard images more intuitive and interactive. It uses the Google Maps API and Keyhole Markup Language (KML) to provide geographic context to the images and events. Descriptive tags, or keywords, have been applied to each image, enabling easier navigation and discovery. This combination of features creates a simple and effective way to enhance our understanding of hazard events using imagery.
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