Arctic Ocean, Canada Basin, July 22, 2005. (NOAA/Jeremy Potter)
The United States and our neighbors to the north in Canada share a border approximately 5,525 miles long. Some 1,538 miles (or roughly 28%) of which are shared with the State of Alaska alone. And with this shared boundary comes shared natural resources, shared interests, and the need for a shared understanding of how we can work together to protect our communities, wildlife, and environment from the escalating risk of oil spills and other accidents in the Arctic.
To that end, NOAA’s Office of Response and Restoration co-hosted a workshop in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, with the Inuvialuit Settlement Region Joint Secretariat (a Canadian delegate representing aboriginal interests to the Arctic Council) and the University of New Hampshire’s Coastal Response Research Center from February 12-13, 2013. The goal was to bring together representatives from both the U.S. and Canada to examine the potential for incorporating Canadian data into NOAA’s online mapping tool, Arctic ERMA®.
Arctic ERMA (Environmental Response Management Application) is an online Geographic Information Systems (GIS) tool being used to prepare and plan for Arctic pollution response, assessment, and environmental restoration. ERMA brings together critical information needed for an effective emergency response in the Arctic’s distinctive conditions, such as the extent and concentration of sea ice, locations of ports and oil and gas pipelines, and vulnerable environmental resources which could be harmed by an oil spill.
The workshop participants came from a variety of organizations. Here, top row: NASA, Consultant, Canada Department of Fisheries and Oceans, Canadian Ice Service, Inuvialuit Settlement Region Joint Secretariat. Bottom row: Aboriginal Affairs and Northern Development Canada, Environment Canada, NOAA. (University of New Hampshire/Kathy Mandsager)
Discussions at the workshop focused on identifying the regional gaps in data in Arctic ERMA, usable data formats, and how to improve functionality and access to information and tools that would help in the case of an oil spill or environmental accident. Workshop participants spanned multiple areas of expertise: government emergency responders, environmental protection and fisheries managers, weather and natural resource agencies, private industry, non-governmental organizations, local indigenous communities, and universities.
By the end, the workshop improved our understanding of U.S. and Canadian data management practices and systems, how we identify both the data that are available and still needed, and what the long-term training needs are for Arctic communities. We also discussed at length how to better incorporate traditional local knowledge about landscapes and natural resources in Arctic ERMA. We hope that engaging in these conversations and building strong relationships today will promote the kind of cooperation and collaboration that will carry us through any environmental emergencies in the future.
Just a few days after Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, U.S. Coast Guard Admirals discuss search and rescue strategies in front of a satellite image pieced together by NOAA Geographic Information Systems specialists. (NOAA)
This is a post by Office of Response and Restoration Geographic Information Specialist Jill Bodnar.
The initial phase of responding to an oil spill or natural disaster can often be described as “organized chaos.” Being able to manage effectively the resulting influx of data is crucial during that time. Responders need to identify priority areas for cleanup, risks to the environment, and status of cleanup activities quickly and correctly. This enables both the response staff at the scene of the disaster and government leadership back at headquarters to make informed decisions about dealing with the event (whether it’s an oil spill, hurricane, etc.) and potential pollution.
Maps are one way to organize all these important data into a common picture that gives everyone the same “situational awareness” and tracks the progress of the pollution response over time. Traditionally, Geographic Information Systems (GIS) specialists at the incident command post (the nerve center of the pollution response) would painstakingly create and then either print or email these maps to responders and government leadership. However, over the past few years, we at NOAA’s Office of Response and Restoration, which provides scientific and technical support for marine pollution, have become leaders in using web mapping to revolutionize how people respond to these environmental emergencies.
The Past: Paper Cuts
My specialty is using Geographic Information Systems (GIS) during pollution responses, and I’ve honed these skills in numerous drills and incidents over the past 12 years. Through the mid-2000s, NOAA’s information management team of GIS specialists like me would come to a pollution response with CDs full of base data as a starting point for the affected area. These CDs contained nautical charts, Environmental Sensitivity Index data showing natural resources at risk from oiling, state agency Area Contingency Plans, roads and waterways, and occasionally even aerial imagery. All of this information was fed into the GIS program on our laptop computers at the command post.
Next came the data pouring in from field observers working at the spill. This included the type and location of oil observed during overflight surveys, sightings of wildlife in the area, and strategies for placing oil containment boom. We then would build maps reflecting this information and showing the status of cleanup operations. Responders waited as their paper maps were created and printed out before they briefed the leaders of the response (the Unified Command) or headed back into the field, maps in hand. The process was time-consuming, and you often worked under very stressful conditions and late into the night. There was only enough time to get the basic information on to a map as soon as possible.
A big change in how maps were used at responses happened during Hurricane Katrina in 2005, which was around the time Google Earth and its satellite imagery became accessible to people without expensive desktop GIS programs. Suddenly, everyone at the command post wanted to print large, poster-sized maps layered over satellite imagery, which helped visualize the flooded carnage of New Orleans, surrounding neighborhoods, and coastal areas. While the imagery provided unprecedented detail, printing it required a great deal of blue ink and plotter paper, which would quickly run out, hampering our efforts. Luckily I had a contact at Hewlett-Packard who sent us boxes and boxes of extra plotter paper and ink, and FedEx was able to deliver it to us despite their own issues with the hurricane. It was like Christmas (except with more paper cuts)!
But an even bigger change was in store when the Office of Response and Restoration (OR&R) unveiled the jump to modern-day web mapping for pollution response: the Environmental Response Management Application (ERMA®).
The Present and Future: Pixels
ERMA is an online mapping tool that integrates and synthesizes data—often in real time—into a single interactive map, providing a quick visualization of the situation after a disaster and improving communication and coordination among responders and environmental stakeholders. Developed by OR&R, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, and University of New Hampshire, ERMA originally was released as a regional pilot project in New Hampshire in 2007. It has since expanded across the continental U.S., Caribbean, Arctic, and Pacific Islands.
The Deepwater Horizon/BP spill public ERMA site showing satellite imagery and bathymetry, forecasted paths of oil, command post locations, and sea turtle observations. Unlike a static map, the user is able to turn on any layers and zoom to their area of interest. Click image to enlarge. (NOAA)
But ERMA’s most pivotal role has been in response to the Deepwater Horizon/BP oil spill in 2010. Federal, state, and local spill responders used ERMA to convey what was happening at the front lines of this massive spill: what shoreline had been oiled and how badly, satellite approximations of the spill’s extent, fishery closures, and stranded marine life. At the height of the response, there were six different command posts around the Gulf of Mexico and in Washington, DC. NOAA had GIS specialists in each of them, uploading data 24/7 so that ERMA could be used in briefings to the Unified Command, the White House, NOAA leadership, and to the public via the ERMA Gulf Response website (a public-access version of ERMA). Once released to the public, ERMA was highlighted and used by media outlets to show, for example, current fishing closure areas.
The U.S. Coast Guard uses ERMA during the response to Hurricane Isaac in September 2012. (NOAA)
In addition, ERMA allowed hundreds of responders and thousands of public users to see the information they needed—coming from multiple sources—at any time, heralding a new era in response where access to data and maps wasn’t limited to a GIS specialist’s printing capabilities. Nearly three years later, our NOAA GIS team and other responders around the country are still working on the Deepwater Horizon/BP spill, which includes documenting resulting environmental injuries, and ERMA is a key technology helping us do that job.
More recently, ERMA was put into action during the Hurricane Sandy pollution response in the fall of 2012. During that response, ERMA was used successfully to show federal and state responders and NOAA and Coast Guard leadership post-hurricane satellite imagery, dozens of priority pollution locations, and on-the-ground field photos of impacted areas. Throughout this high-visibility event, ERMA put the most important data they needed to see in their hands.
To some extent, paper maps will always have their place at a response, especially since there is often no Internet connection, say, on a boat in the Gulf of Mexico. GIS specialists will always manage data and create maps to tell a story, but more than ever, ERMA is placing data at the fingertips of responders, often reducing the number of paper maps printed. The emerging technologies behind ERMA and the power of the Internet are transforming how we collect and manage information and how we make decisions during an oil spill or hurricane response—resulting in more efficient and effective use of time, resources, and money. Not to mention saving my fingers from future paper cuts.
Jill Bodnar, NOAA GIS specialist.
Jill Bodnar graduated from the University of Rhode Island with a Masters degree in natural resources, specializing in using GIS for oil spill response. She has been a geographic information specialist with NOAA’s Office of Response and Restoration for over 11 years and has responded to numerous incidents in that time, including Hurricanes Katrina, Ike, Isaac, and Sandy, and the 2007 Cosco Busan and 2010 Deepwater Horizon/BP oil spills.
This is a post by NOAA Environmental Scientist Dr. Amy Merten.
The ShoreZone project photographs, maps, and collects information about Pacific Northwest shorelines, like in this view of Kruzof Island, Sitka Sound, Alaska. (NOAA Fisheries)
As Chief of the Spatial Data Branch in NOAA’s Office of Response and Restoration, my focus is all about data. In particular, that means figuring out how to access data related to oil spills: the type of information useful for planning before a spill and for the response, environmental injury assessment, and restoration after a spill. Once we get that data, which often comes from other science agencies, universities, and industry, we can then ingest it into Arctic ERMA®, NOAA’s online mapping tool for environmental disaster data. While at the Alaska Marine Science Symposium this week, I have spent much of my time working with experts who provide and manage that kind of data.
For example, the Alaska Ocean Observing System (AOOS) provides real-time and historical coastal data to multiple stakeholders, including NOAA for Arctic ERMA. AOOS is also the host for the newly signed data-sharing agreement [PDF] between NOAA and three oil companies (Shell, ConocoPhillips, and StatOil). These companies have agreed to share the physical oceanographic, geological, and biological data they have been collecting near areas of Arctic offshore oil and gas activities since 2009. This is an unprecedented amount of data that the industry now is sharing with the federal government and the public. The data are available at www.aoos.org.
A view of Anchorage from the Alaska Marine Science Symposium. (NOAA)
My colleague and our Arctic ERMA geographic information system (GIS) expert, Zach Winters-Staszak, attended the Arctic Mapping Workshop sponsored by our partners at the University of Alaska Fairbanks GINA program. Their geographic information network gives us access to high-resolution base maps, imagery, high frequency radar, ice radar, webcams, and more. Zach learned about new data sets and new ways for pulling high impact data into Arctic ERMA.
Another helpful information source I learned more about was NOAA’s ShoreZone project. ShoreZone [PDF] is a popular Pacific Northwest dataset of high-resolution aerial videos and photographs of the shoreline in Alaska, British Columbia, Washington, and Oregon at extreme low tide. The photos and videos are augmented with habitat classifications of the different zones along the shoreline, such as salt marsh or kelp beds. We already pull in ShoreZone data layers into our Arctic and Pacific Northwest ERMA sites.
These data are valuable for preparedness and response to oil spills and for understanding places where oil and marine debris may accumulate naturally. It’s especially useful for understanding what the shoreline might look like before going out to survey for signs of oil or marine debris accumulation. It can help you decide how you’re going to access the shore (boat, helicopter, on foot) and what you might expect to find. ShoreZone surveyed the Kotzebue and North Slope regions of the Alaskan Arctic this past summer, which we’re excited to draw into Arctic ERMA when they are available.
Dr. Amy Merten is pictured here with children from the Alaskan village of Kivalina. She was in Alaska for an oil spill workshop in the village of Kotzebue.
Amy Merten is the Spatial Data Branch Chief in NOAA’s Office of Response and Restoration. Amy developed the concept for the online mapping tool ERMA (Environmental Response Mapping Application). ERMA was developed in collaboration with the University of New Hampshire. She expanded the ERMA team at NOAA to fill response and natural resource trustee responsibilities during the 2010 Deepwater Horizon/BP oil spill. Amy oversees data management of the resulting oil spill damage assessment. She received her doctorate and master’s degrees from the University of Maryland.
During a disaster, being able to keep track of the information flowing in about damages and operations can make a huge difference. Here, we give you some from-the-ground perspectives about how essential this can be during a response like the one to Hurricane Sandy.
Coast Guard Station New York, located on Staten Island, sustains flooding damage and debris after Hurricane Sandy passes through New York Harbor, Tuesday, Oct. 30, 2012. (U.S. Coast Guard/Petty Officer 1st Class Josh Janney)
NOAA Scientific Support Coordinator Ed Levine: The last weekend of October became very hectic for those of us in disaster response as Hurricane Sandy moved its havoc up the U.S. eastern seaboard. After the storm passed, initial reports indicated that coastal New York and New Jersey, especially around Long Island Sound and New York Harbor, were among the hardest hit.
When I arrived at the U.S. Coast Guard’s base of operations on Staten Island, N.Y., I was surprised to find that the building was on generator power and back-up lighting; was without heat or telephones; and had minimal computer access and cell phone connectivity. In other words, they were part of the disaster.
Fairly quickly, however, they managed to set up an incident command post. Soon I was able to survey the coastal damage and pollution threats in a Coast Guard helicopter.
Many areas were extremely impacted. There were oils spills in a national park, within the harbor, along the coast, and in the Arthur Kill waterway bordering Staten Island. Shipping containers had been washed off piers and docks into the water and others were strewn about on land, not far from the piles of smaller boats run aground.
Having previously responded to several hurricanes in the Gulf of Mexico, I realized how quickly data management would become a major issue for tracking the pollution response as it progressed. The Coast Guard and other responders need accurate, up-to-date information and maps to coordinate their planning, inform their decisions, and execute their operations. That’s where our team of information management specialists enter the picture.
In a city still plagued by power outages, supply shortages, and long lines for gasoline, our Geographic Information Systems (GIS) specialists arrived to a hectic scene at the response command post. They began processing data coming in from field reconnaissance and feeding it into NOAA’s Environmental Response Management Application (ERMA®) for the Atlantic Coast. ERMA is an online mapping tool that integrates and synthesizes data—often in real time—into a single interactive map, providing a quick visualization of the situation after a disaster and improving communication and coordination among responders and environmental stakeholders.
Welcome organizers of chaos, the team mapped high-priority locations of pollution and debris, displayed aerial imagery and on-the-ground photography, helped coordinate field team deployment, and identified areas of concern for environmental sensitivity and cultural and historical significance.
A view of Atlantic ERMA showing Coast Guard field team photos (red) and the aerial survey path (green) taken at Great Kills Harbor Marina on Staten Island, N.Y., during the post-Hurricane Sandy assessment and cleanup. The data are shown on top of NOAA National Geodetic Survey aerial images taken after the storm and show the impact along the shoreline. The photos were processed in the NOAA Photologger database at the Coast Guard incident command post on Staten Island, uploaded to ERMA, and used by the Coast Guard to prioritize cleanup and plan for the next day’s activities, as well as for briefing agency leaders and partners. (NOAA) Click to enlarge.
NOAA Geographic Information Specialist Jill Bodnar and her team: During the Hurricane Sandy pollution response, my colleagues and I divided the GIS work into two areas: general information management and ERMA support.
Information management is important because it becomes a source of accountability and for providing updates on the progress of cleanup operations and impacts to the surrounding natural resources. Well-run information management is crucial in identifying the priorities and status of pollution events quickly and correctly, which, for example, can help keep a leaking chemical drum from reaching a nearby estuary full of nesting birds.
In the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, the U.S. Coast Guard oversees the removal of a drum with unknown contents with New York City in the background. NOAA’s ERMA application helped responders prioritize the removal of pollution threats such as this one. (U.S. Coast Guard)
At the Staten Island command post, Coast Guard field teams would arrive from a day of work and hand their cameras, GPS units, and often their field notes to our information management specialists. Then, we would upload photos, GPS coordinates, and field observations into software programs and spreadsheets, and the work of verifying the data would begin: Did we have all the data pieces we needed? Was it all correct?
Then, the information would get pulled into our central, web-based GIS application, ERMA. There are a few main roles for ERMA at a command post like the one on Staten Island. One of the foremost functions is to help Coast Guard operations field staff members visualize their field data, such as the pollution targets and field photos, and overlay them with post-hurricane satellite imagery onto a map.
NOAA Geographic Information Specialist Matt Dorsey: Field photos are very informative and give a lot of insight to some of the unique and complex issues for pollution prevention and removal following a hurricane or other emergency situations. Some of the less frequent but more challenging scenarios include vessels inside houses, vessels aground a mile away from the closest waterway, and many vessels swept out of marinas into sensitive marsh areas.
Vessels that had been swept into marshes were a big issue while I was there. The Coast Guard wanted to know which sensitive marsh areas had vessels washed into them, how to prioritize these boats for removing oil or gas aboard them, and how to put together a plan for removing the actual vessel without disturbing the area too much more than it already had been.
Jill Bodnar and her team: Using ERMA as the “big picture” of the response helps responders tell the story of a pollution site, such as a grounded fishing boat with a leaking fuel tank. The Coast Guard operations staff was using ERMA to identify these priority locations before they went in the field, and created their own customized maps to take with them. ERMA gave them a lot of freedom in planning their field activities because they did not have to rely solely on a GIS specialist to create and print maps for them.
ERMA also plays other roles for the Unified Command, which uses it to see the most current field data to plan for the next day’s activities, to brief Coast Guard leadership on the scale and status of their teams’ cleanup operations.
The benefit of everyone using a tool like ERMA is that everyone involved in the response—the Coast Guard, NOAA, Environmental Protection Agency, States of New York and New Jersey, and other agencies—is looking at the most up-to-date data, instead of information that may be a few days old. All of the responders and decision makers, both inside and outside of the incident command post, know they are looking at the same, consistent, high-quality information and using that to prioritize response decisions. Everyone sees the same picture–whether it’s the frenzied first day after a disaster or weeks later.
Ed Levine, NOAA’s Scientific Support Coordinator in New York.
Ed Levine works as Scientific Support Coordinator for NOAA’s Office of Response and Restoration, where he provides scientific and technical support during oil and chemical spills in the New York area.
Jill Bodnar, NOAA GIS specialist.
Jill Bodnar graduated from the University of Rhode Island with a Masters degree in natural resources, specializing in using GIS for oil spill response. She has been a geographic information specialist with NOAA’s Office of Response and Restoration for over 11 years and has responded to numerous incidents in that time, including Hurricanes Katrina, Ike, Isaac, and Sandy, and the 2007 Cosco Busan and 2010 Deepwater Horizon/BP oil spills.
Matt Dorsey, NOAA GIS specialist.
Matt Dorsey is a GIS specialist for NOAA’s Office of Response and Restoration based in Long Beach, Calif. Matt has been working on the Deepwater Horizon/BP oil spill since June of 2010, utilizing GIS systems and ERMA to provide mapping support for the response phase of the spill and continuing into the current damage assessment phase. Matt is the Southwest regional co-lead for the Environmental Response Management Application (ERMA).
On November 15, 2012, a Hurricane Sandy response team oversees the removal of a sunken boat that was discharging oil off of Staten Island, N.Y. (U.S. Environmental Protection Agency)
Weeks after Hurricane Sandy roared across the East Coast, NOAA’s Office of Response and Restoration still has several personnel on scene at the pollution response command post on Staten Island, N.Y. We are working to assess and reduce the remaining environmental impacts from the oil spills, debris, and subsequent cleanup in the wake of Hurricane Sandy.
At this point, our Scientific Support Coordinators are still participating in aerial surveys of the areas affected by oil spills and debris scattered throughout the waters in and around New Jersey and New York. They have been providing guidance on reducing environmental impacts to sensitive habitats during the recovery of freight containers which may contain hazardous materials, large fuel tanks, and large debris, such as a large pleasure craft grounded in coastal wetlands. In addition, they continue to coordinate with the Coast Guard and state environmental officials to establish when it is appropriate to transition from active oil recovery operations, which might involve cleanup workers pumping oil out of the water, to passive cleanup (using absorbent materials) with monitoring.
Our GIS specialists also remain at the command post, managing response data in the web-based data mapping tool, ERMA®. This team has been working with other NOAA offices to display in ERMA post-storm data such as the National Geodetic Survey aerial imagery and Office of the Coast Survey side scan sonar results. Throughout the pollution response, they have been training responders in the command post to use ERMA and providing technical support, for example, improving the organization and flow of data into the application. They also have been working with other government agencies, including EPA, FEMA, and the states of New York and New Jersey, to obtain and share data for the response.
Containment boom surrounds the oil and debris released from tanks at the Phillips 66 Refinery in Linden, N.J., on November 12, 2012. (NOAA)
In the week after the storm, NOAA’s damage assessment staff began collecting data on impacts to natural resources, especially affected coastal habitats, and coordinating with state and federal co-trustees to determine whether to pursue a natural resource damage assessment and implement environmental restoration. They, along with representatives from New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection and Motiva, performed land and boat surveys of affected sites, including several creeks in New Jersey and New York possibly oiled by the Motiva Refinery spill in Sewarren, N.J.
Currently, this team of federal and state trustees is investigating reports of oiled wildlife and habitats in the area of the oil spilled at the Phillips 66 Refinery in Linden, N.J. Our NOAA damage assessment experts use reports from our responders’ aerial surveys to target which creeks and wetland areas to survey for injuries.
Recovery after hurricanes such as Sandy can take a very long time, and our office likely will be active in the efforts to promote environmental recovery in the months to come.
Stay tuned for more photos, maps, and updates on the pollution-related response efforts at IncidentNews.
A view out the back of a New Jersey Army National Guard cargo truck conducting relief operations October 29 in Atlantic City, N.J. during Hurricane Sandy. (U.S. Air Force photo/Tech. Sgt. Matt Hecht)
As Post Tropical Cyclone Sandy moves northwest, the storm is creating large waves and potential damage in the Great Lakes region. While water levels are subsiding on the East Coast, the combination of tides and the storm are still causing levels to be higher than normal.
This ERMA screen shot shows Hurricane Sandy’s approach over the East Coast on October 29, 2012.
Office of Response and Restoration responders are watching closely and standing by to assist with the recovery efforts. Initial recovery efforts are focused on safety and restoring essential services, such as power and transportation.
One of the challenges facing communities is information management. ERMA® (Environmental Response Management Application) is a web-based Geographic Information System (GIS) tool that assists both emergency responders and environmental resource managers in dealing with environmental impacts. OR&R scientists are ensuring that Atlantic ERMA is ready to go should it be needed.
NOAA’s Scientific Support Coordinators and others from the Office of Response and Restoration are on standby and in communication with their counterparts at the U.S. Coast Guard and Environmental Protection Agency to address these challenges.
Three cleaned brown pelicans prior to being released at the wildlife rehabilitation center. (NOAA/Ed Levine)
Even though Hurricane Isaac blew off the weather radar several weeks ago, the pollution and destruction it left behind in the Gulf of Mexico still remain. After the hurricane’s initial landfall the week of August 28, the U.S. Coast Guard received reports of 158 oil spills and 171 hazardous material targets in the affected areas in Louisiana. Some two weeks later, the numbers are down to 13 open oil discharges and 57 hazardous material targets remaining.
At this time, NOAA’s Office of Response and Restoration has five support personnel, consisting of Scientific Support Coordinators and information management specialists, on scene in the New Orleans command post assisting response operations for these cleanups. The incidents ranged from very small (several gallons) to medium (60,000 gallons) sized releases of oil and a wide variety of chemicals.
Map of locations of oil and hazardous material spills in Louisiana resulting from Hurricane Isaac, as of Sept. 17, 2012. Click to enlarge. (NOAA)
NOAA has been involved in assessing shorelines possibly affected by these spills, conducting aerial surveys of coastal waters, making cleanup recommendations, and performing final assessments of oiled areas that have been cleaned up. In addition, our experts have been coordinating the federal and state agencies involved, mapping data, and managing response information in databases.
NOAA’s Lieutenant (junior grade) Kyle Jellison describing the location of oil spill sites to the U.S. Coast Guard Situation Unit inside the Hurricane Isaac command post in New Orleans, La. (NOAA/Ed Levine)
This work is in support of the unified command, which is made up of the U.S. Coast Guard and Louisiana Oil Spill Coordinator’s Office, along with several oil and chemical facilities identified as the originators of materials spilled during the hurricane.
Additionally, OR&R is collaborating with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, NOAA National Marine Fisheries Service, NOAA National Weather Service, Louisiana Office of Historic Preservation, and the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries’ Scenic Rivers program to address impacts to natural resources and to determine when cleanups are complete. NOAA anticipates being on scene another week.
This is a post by the Office of Response and Restoration’s Donna Roberts, Jill Petersen, and Ashley Braun.
Pelican escaping oiled waters after the tank ship Eagle Otome spill near Port Arthur, Texas, in January of 2010. (NOAA)
The U.S. shoreline stretches 95,471 miles, from the coast of Alaska to the Great Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico. However, these shores vary greatly in type, in how people use them, and in which species of birds, fish, and wildlife inhabit them.
These differences affect how sensitive the shorelines are to spilled oil and other environmental hazards. NOAA works with the federal and state governments to produce Environmental Sensitivity Index (ESI) maps, which identify coastal locations that may be especially vulnerable to an oil spill.
This series of maps shows the shorelines, wildlife, and habitat most sensitive to oil, as well as the resources people use there, such as a fishery or recreational beach.
Shorelines on Environmental Sensitivity Index maps are color-coded by sensitivity to oil. Symbols mark localized areas for biological and human-use resources.
For example, an ESI map in North Carolina might indicate an estuary where piping plovers, a threatened shorebird, nest between March and August. It would also display a color-coded ranking revealing that the saltwater marsh is highly sensitive to oiling and show the presence of and contact information for a nearby marina.
Quick Decisions
When a shoreline is threatened by an approaching oil spill, responders must decide quickly which locations along a shoreline to protect. Making these decisions sometimes requires difficult tradeoffs. Having this valuable information ready beforehand helps spill planners and responders prioritize areas to protect from oil and identify appropriate cleanup strategies.
For NOAA’s Office of Response and Restoration, one of our main goals in oil spill response is to reduce the environmental consequences of both spills and cleanup efforts. We help create and maintain ESI maps to facilitate the decision-making process surrounding these efforts. Some of the human-use resources on ESI maps include potential access points and staging areas, including boat launches and airports, which would be useful during an oil spill response.
Digital Maps
We offer ESI maps—and the data represented on them—for all of the U.S. coastal states and territories. Besides traditional print maps, we also make the data available through geographic information system (GIS) technology, which allows a much greater level of detail. You can see what digital file formats are available and download maps for your geographic region.
While all of the digital ESI maps are available in a free format, our team also has developed a collection of tools to simplify viewing and querying the data in an advanced GIS format. One of our newer tools, the Seasonal Summary Tool, creates a personalized ESI map, giving a snapshot of everything going on in a specific region for a particular time of the year. This may be beneficial for responders looking at an area impacted by an oil spill.
Another feature of the digital maps and data is that they group together species with common habitats, behaviors, and feeding patterns. One ESI tool can take advantage of this grouping to allow users to view areas where only those groups, such as birds of prey, occur. The user can filter this information further to show only the areas where these birds may be nesting in June or show only federally threatened or endangered species.
Mississippi Dog’s Paw Environmental Sensitivity Index Map, showing a GIS tool feature which allows the user to delineate noncontiguous boundaries on the map.
A variety of people make use of Environmental Sensitivity Index maps, from the U.S. Coast Guard and Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM), to the Army Corps of Engineers and state contingency planners and emergency responders.
ESI maps are a constantly evolving product for constantly changing coasts and are rich with complex information. Since 1990, Jill Petersen has been observing this evolution firsthand, through her work on Environmental Sensitivity Index maps for the Office of Response and Restoration.
While demonstrating some of the advanced GIS tools in 2011, Petersen highlighted one which also allows users to draw their own geographic boundaries. The boundaries she, a canine enthusiast, chose for the Mississippi map? A dog’s paw, of course.
Donna Roberts is a writer for the Emergency Response Division of NOAA’s Office of Response and Restoration (OR&R). Her work supports the OR&R website and the Environmental Sensitivity Index (ESI) mapping program.
Jill Petersen began working with the NOAA spill response group in 1988. Originally a programmer and on-scene responder, in 1991 her focus switched to mapping support, a major component of which is the ESI program. Throughout the years, Jill has worked to broaden the ESI audience by providing ESIs in a variety of formats and developing appropriate mapping tools. Jill has been the ESI program manager since 2001.
This is a guest post byemergency planner Tom Bergman. All links leave this blog.
Many of you are familiar with Google Maps or MapQuest, examples of free online mapping tools that have probably saved you from driving around lost for hours. But I bet you haven’t heard of another free mapping tool, known as MARPLOT, which has definitely saved more than a few people’s lives.
Back in 1986, NOAA and Environmental Protection Agency staff created MARPLOT, along with several other programs in a software suite called CAMEO, to help emergency planners and responders deal with chemical spills. Even today, the CAMEO software programs remain popular tools for hazardous material releases worldwide. One of these programs, CAMEOfm, gives anyone the ability to create and place custom objects (like a hospital or school) on a MARPLOT map and link those objects to data (like the hospital’s emergency contact information) stored in the CAMEOfm database.
But I can tell you that this software doesn’t only come in handy when a truck full of chemicals tips over next to a hospital. MARPLOT, when linked up with the database application CAMEOfm, is regularly operated as a free and easy-to-use Geographic Information System (GIS). One of the attractive features of these two programs is that they operate independently of any internet or server connection. This can be critical for responders during emergencies, when internet and cell phone service may simply not be available.
An aerial view of the damage to downtown West Liberty, Ky, after the March 2, 2012, EF3 tornado hit the area. (NOAA/National Weather Service/Allen Bolling)
This was certainly the case on March 2, 2012, when a category EF3 tornado struck the Kentucky town of West Liberty with winds between 136–165 miles per hour. When the Urban Search and Rescue team arrived on scene from Lexington, Ky., they discovered that the severe weather had disabled the area’s internet and cell phone service.
Fortunately, the local emergency manager was able to supply search and rescue team commander Gregg Bayer with a laptop computer which had MARPLOT installed with local map data and aerial photos of the affected region. They quickly were able to organize their search efforts and create customized maps by drawing search zones and map symbols directly on top of aerial photos. The MARPLOT program was instrumental in helping the emergency responders get familiar with the area, document suspected paths of destruction, and obtain 2010 U.S. Census estimates for the number of people and buildings affected—all without internet, cell phone, or server access.
A month later, on April 4, 2012, an even stronger tornado (rated EF4) ravaged northeastern Oklahoma and southwestern Kansas. Several area counties used MARPLOT and CAMEOfm to track the path of the tornado and then document and manage information related to recovery efforts, including photographs and videos of the storm damage.
Since 2009, a school district in Orlando, Fla., has been making extensive use of these free tools to develop high quality maps for emergency planning activities. To prepare for Florida’s not-unusual hurricanes, the district’s emergency manager, Joe Mastandrea, combines school facility information in MARPLOT with predicted storm paths imported from the hurricane-tracking program HURREVAC 2010. This helps the school district know which schools might be affected (and to what degree) by an approaching storm and be ready to keep everyone safe.
In this view of MARPLOT, you can see two schools which might be affected by a severe weather event in Orlando, Fla.
Another, completely different, application of this software has started recently in a number of Oklahoma counties: taking inventory of their road signs. The county evaluates each of its road or highway signs using a “reflectometer,” an instrument that predicts the sign’s anticipated lifespan. The information from the reflectometer is imported into MARPLOT, which plots the sign’s location and allows users to search and display the data for each sign. By tracking when each sign needs to be replaced with a new, more reflective sign, the counties can make roads safer for drivers traveling at night.
In the reality of counties with only 3,000 people and no paid firefighters, emergency staff can’t afford to hire GIS specialists (much less the fancy software) to do this kind of work. Fortunately, they can afford to download the free MARPLOT and other CAMEO suite software and easily put it to use.
Tom Bergman is the author of the CAMEO Companion and host of the www.cameotraining.orgwebsite. Tom is the EPCRA (Emergency Planning and Community Right-to-Know Act) Tier 2 Program Manager for the State of Oklahoma and has been a CAMEO trainer for many years. He has conducted CAMEO training courses in Lithuania, Poland, England, and 43 U.S. states.
