Warning Systems Are Essential to Communicating Threats, Research Paper

Warning systems are essential to communicating threats, whether man-made, technological, or natural, to the public. In this paper, we provide a summary overview of at least two types of disaster warning systems used in the international disaster community or a nation's communication system (other than the U.S.). The disaster warning systems in this paper are the flood warning system (Flood Alerts Map) used in the UK and Japanese Earthquake Early Warning. We discuss the use of these two types of warning systems throughout the world (excluding the U.S.).

Flood Alerts Map-UK

The Flood Alerts Map is an interactive data visualization-based early warning system built by Shoothil, a firm which is based in Shrewsbury to provide a live flood warning map that employs data that is supplied by the United Kingdom Environment Agency (Brown,2012).The UK Environment Agency has an elaborate nationwide network of flood monitoring stations that are actively involved in the issuing of flood alerts and warnings. The system map combines/aggregates all the alerts from the last fifteen minutes and then lays them over a map. The UK Environment Agency is noted to provide a flood warning service throughout Wales and England in the areas that are at risk of flooding from the sea and rivers (Environment Agency,2012).In certain parts of England, the system provides information or warning service for flooding threat from groundwater. By means of the latest technology, the Environment Agency staff monitors the rainfall, sea conditions and river levels 24 hours a day and then use this data to forecast the possibility of flooding. Reynard et al. (2004) noted that as the severity of flooding increase as a result of landuse and climate changes, there is a need to come up with more reliable and effective warning systems. The incorporation of the concepts of numerical weather prediction (NWP) into the existing flood warning systems can lead to an increase in the forecast lead times from just a few hours to some few days. The use of a single numerical weather prediction (NWP) is never sufficient to effectively quantify the forecast uncertainties. It is therefore crucial that a series of Ensemble Prediction System (EPS) be used in the provision of a more efficient early flood warning system….....