Automated Geo-Spatial Hazard Warning System GEOWARNS: Italian Case Study

Abstract

Hazard warning is an area of research that requires both hazard evaluation and warning dissemination. At present, no such system carrying out both hazard evaluation and warning communication directly to the user community exists. Thus, there has been a need to develop an automated integrated system to categorize hazard and issue warning that reaches users directly. The objective of this paper is to develop an integrated, independent, generalized, and automated geo-hazard warning system, making use of geo-spatial data under popular usage platform. Thus, in this paper, development of GEOWARNS, an automated geo-spatial hazard warning system, has been elaborated. Testing and validation of the developed system has been carried out for landslide hazard evaluation and its warning dissemination pertaining to a comprehensive case study in Italy. The functionality of GEOWARNS is modular in architecture, having input, understanding, rainfall prediction, expert, output, and warning modules. The categories of hazard zones that have been evaluated by GEOWARNS show discrepancy of 5.9% in high hazard zones, nearly approximately 1.1 and 3.8% in moderate- and low-hazard zones, respectively, in comparison with the in situ expert evaluation. Further, the message dissemination through local cellular network has been found to be immediate with a maximum time lag recorded of 50 s, a minimum of 5 s, and an average of 15 s within the acceptable limits as indicated by the authorities in the United Nations (UN). Thus, it can be concluded that an automated hazard warning system has been developed. However, other scopes are needed to develop it further.