In this lesson, we will rely on our new knowledge of geospatial perspectives and technology as it is used in the four stages of emergency management to develop scenarios that can be used to inform the design of new geospatial systems for emergency management. Scenarios are a key creative mechanism for evaluating system designs against the likely impacts and outcomes from a hypothetical disaster situation. You will learn about scenarios and then develop your own.
By the successful completion of this lesson, you should be able to:
Lesson 7 is one week in length. To finish this lesson, you must complete the activities listed below.
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To Do |
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Please refer to the Course Calendar for specific due dates.
If you have questions about the content or lesson activities, please post them to the General Questions and Discussion forum in Canvas. While you are there, feel free to post your own responses if you, too, are able to help a classmate. If your question is of a personal nature, please email me directly through Canvas.
Besides researching previous disasters and geospatially-enabled emergency management technology, an excellent way to forecast what is needed in a future geospatial system is to develop scenarios. You've already had some experience with this in Lesson 3 where you explored potential disasters for Texas using the InaSAFE plugin for QGIS.
In a disaster management setting, scenarios are realistic stories that describe what would happen to people, infrastructure, and the natural environment with a given set of disaster conditions. Often, scenarios are developed as part of a hazard assessment process where they can be used to predict the possible effects on a place, given different types of hazard situations. Scenarios are also used to create training simulations to test preparedness measures and response plans. This latter purpose is particularly relevant for this class; we need to use scenarios to evaluate the extent to which our geospatial infrastructure and analytical capabilities will actually hold up during a disaster situation.
Note that in geospatial system design activities, scenarios can end up being quite formal in terms of their structure. For further reading on the essence of scenario-based design, check out this section from Geospatial System Analysis and Design: GEOG 583 [2] – NOTE: you don’t have to read all of this! Just have a quick look.
A great way to understand scenarios is to read a few yourself. The US Department of Homeland Security and FEMA have prepared many different scenarios and training materials that you can review. Please click on the "Emergency Planning Exercises For Your Organization" link on Emergency Planning Exercises [3] page to see some examples. In particular, I would like to explore a few of these exercises. Please pay particular attention to the roles that participants play, the rules to follow, the scenario itself, and the prompts used to keep things moving. What are participants expected to do and get out of this? Focus on these (but feel free to explore others):
“Developed by the Office of External Affairs and the FEMA's National Exercise Division, this exercise is based on a combination of U.S. communities experiencing critical power failure during a severe weather event. Designed to help the private sector identify ways to prepare for, respond to, and recover from such a disaster.”
“Prepare to respond to and recover from a Category 5 hurricane. Based on the National Planning Scenario for a major hurricane, this exercise was developed by the Office of External Affairs together with FEMA's National Exercise Division to prepare the private sector for catastrophic damage caused by major flooding, tornado, and other natural disasters.”
“Based on the National Planning Scenario for a chlorine tank explosion, this exercise is designed to help the private sector improve Organizational Continuity, Preparedness, and Resiliency in the event of an emergency, to respond to, recover and restore operations.”
You’ll also note that scenarios often go hand-in-hand with Tabletop exercises. Tabletop exercises are simulated response activities. Usually, these are held in an extremely generic hotel ballroom with stakeholders of all types hunkered down on their laptops. An exercise begins with a scenario description, and then a moderator provides additional information during the response activities to throw things into further chaos and test the limits of what people are prepared for. Some of the FEMA materials include videos to simulate news reporting, although they need to be about forty times more hyperbolic to match the 24/7 news channel intensity these days.
The 2:06 minute video below provides an interesting example of a tabletop exercise conducted by the local government in Waco, Texas in 2017. Pretty low-tech, but you get the idea of what can be accomplished. More focused exercises can subsequently be run with specific stakeholders, e.g., geospatial teams.
This week we will do something a little different for our writing assignment. I would like you to work in groups (see the Lesson 7 announcement for group assignments) to develop one of three different scenarios that focus on leverage points for the use of geospatial applications and technology. You will have the opportunity to imagine a realistic situation and propose different roles for geospatial approaches during the disaster. Each group will use Esri Story Maps [4] to present the content and analysis you have developed.
Group 1 - TBD
Group 2 - TBD
Group 3 - TBD
Group 4 - TBD
Develop a scenario about a cyber attack that impacts the power grid in the Southeast US. Split your scenario into five 6-hour long time periods, starting with the time period 6 hours prior to the attack.
Develop a scenario about a major indiustrial accident (e.g.,chemical spill but you can choose something else) in an industrial site within a major urban area. Split your scenario into five 6-hour long time periods, starting with the time period 6 hours prior to the accident.
You will notice that I have not provided detailed specifics on certain aspects of each disaster, such as how fast the wildfires are spreading, or how effective the cyber-attack was at interrupting the power supply. I encourage you to fill in those gaps in your writing and to imagine plausible answers to those sorts of questions.
I know group work can be challenging if everyone doesn't do their part. As part of the assessment you will be asked to provide confidential feedback to me about how things went with your team mates. If you are having problems during the week, please let me know as well.
For this group exercise, you will be organizing your content into an Esri Story Map. For those of you not familiar with Story Maps, they are a great way of presenting a narrative that includes a mix of text, maps, and other multimedia. They can be a powerful way of conveying a lot of complex material in a “guided tour” format. You can view many examples on the Story Maps homepage [4]. The Story Map related to Hurricane Harvey [5] is particularly nice and you saw one on the 2018 Camp Fire in Lesson 2.
There are a number of ways to get started. You can collaboratively edit in your Story Map directly or you can create a “Storyboard” in a program like PowerPoint or Word and then migrate content. I recommend you develop a storyboard. This will help you organize your content and make sure you have what you need to make the story map. As mentioned in earlier lessons, you can manage your collaboration in the course OneDrive folder.
Here are some resources to get you started.
Before you get started, I recommend that you decide on a division of labor for this work. For example, one person might want to be responsible for developing the overall narrative in consultation with the group, another person might want to take on the analysis/mapping task and another may want to focus on migrating everything into the Story Map.
Since you are working in small groups, collaboration should be fairly straightforward, I suggest the following -
For this week's exercise, please submit the following items to the Lesson 7 Group Scenario Exercise Dropbox in Canvas. See our Course Calendar in Canvas for specific due dates.
I'll assign grades by group. This project is worth 4% of your total course grade and will be graded out of 20 points using the following rubric.
Criteria | Description of Criteria | Possible Points |
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Content and Impact | Your group makes strong and logical arguments and provides analytical insights. Ideas are well organized, clearly communicated and relevant. All criteria are accurately addressed. Supporting details are shared, elaborated upon and demonstrate understanding. Examples are provided, and your StoryMap includes geospatial products, images or other multimedia that support content. | 14 |
Clarity and Mechanics | Your StoryMap shows evidence of editing and careful proofreading. Writing is engaging and well-structured with excellent transitions between sections and visual content. Concepts are integrated in an original manner. | 4 |
Team member evaluation | Confidential comments are provided on your experience working in your assigned group. | 2 |
Total Points | - | 20 |
We have already talked a lot about volunteered geographic information (VGI) and other types of citizen involvement in emergency management, but here we will consider how social media data, like Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook, are being used informally and more formally through big (spatial) data analytics. These are potentially rich data sources but are still a bit difficult to use and have some specific problems around getting accurate and meaningful location information.
To get this section started, have a look at this NBC Nightly News Story (2:01 minutes) about how search-and-rescue used social media to help locate people needing rescue.
In the recent past, there have been significant advances in automated tools for extracting place information from news articles and other text media. This led to a wave of map mashups that allowed for news stories to be browsed using a map. Since those earlier efforts, social media data sources have become ubiquitous, and while similar methods can be used to extract and represent places mentioned in social media reports like Tweets, there are also a lot of challenges we have yet to overcome to make these datasets truly useful in a crisis situation. Moreover, as we saw in Lesson 5, the rise of real-time geospatial systems means we need to be able to locate and understand the content of social media in near real-time, and this is still challenging!
The use of social media in disaster response really took off in the mid-2000s with the efforts of digital humanitarians like Patrick Meier, the author of your textbooks (also see Chapter 3 – Crowd Computing Social Media in Digital Humanitarians for more). In the following short video (1:31 minutes), Patrick explains how this works, particularly how we can teach machines to understand and classify tweets into actionable information.
A few of the challenges associated with mapping information from social media are:
Here at Penn State, we've been engaged in research to develop new tools for foraging through and visualizing geographic information coming from social media reports.
The SensePlace2 project harvests tweets that include disaster-related keywords. From these tweets, we then extract place names and geocode them (along with other named entities, such as people, organizations, and resources). Please have a look at the following 3 minute video, SensePlace2: Visual Analytics and Big Data for Spatiotemporal Sensemaking.
If you want to learn more, check out this 2017 journal article on the project: SensePlace3: a geovisual framework to analyze place–time–attribute information in social media, Cartography and Geographic Information Science [9]
Because so many social media sources now feature API access to their data feeds, new map mashups are now possible that can integrate multiple forms of social media with other geospatial data. Keep in mind that the quality of these vary considerably. For example, some tools just use the location feature that some (very few, it turns out [10]) enable on their devices when they use Twitter.
OPTIONAL
You may be interested in this study that was published just this year (2022!) on using tweets and retweets to understand information diffusion during disasters. This is just FYI, but it is worth a skim now.
Jinwen Xu & Yi Qiang (2022) Analysing Information Diffusion in Natural Hazards using Retweets - a Case Study of 2018 Winter Storm Diego [11], Annals of GIS, 28:2, 213-227, DOI: 10.1080/19475683.2021.1954086
This discussion will be graded out of 15 points.
Please see the Discussion Expectations and Grading page under the Orientation and Course Resources module for details.
This week, I'll be reading each of your term project drafts and providing my feedback. So, for now, you can relax a little about your project and focus on the rest of this lesson.
This week, we have explored how scenarios can be used to predict and plan for how GIS can be used for emergency management situations. Scenarios are stories developed around a hypothetical disaster situation, and they are used quite commonly in planning activities as a way to predict what will happen in a real situation.
You have worked with your classmates in this lesson to develop your own scenarios to see for yourself how scenario-based planning works. I hope you found it valuable to attempt this task with your colleagues. Most people who are charged with the task of planning a GIS for emergency management will not be working on that task alone, so the challenges posed by group work in this situation are quite relevant.
Scenarios are not easy to pin down. There are no universal rules as to what they should or should not include, and there are no automated tools available yet that can generate them. Scenario writing requires the synthesis of multiple types of knowledge, and, ultimately, it demands a fair bit of creativity on behalf of the author(s).
Next, we will apply what we have learned so far about the dimensions of emergency management and ways to plan GIS systems to support emergency management tasks. In the next lesson, we will work together on a case study research project to understand how GIS was used in the mitigation, preparation, response, and recovery from a recent disaster.
You have reached the end of Lesson 7! Double-check the to-do list on the Lesson 7 Overview page to make sure you have completed all of the activities listed there before you begin Lesson 8.
Links
[1] https://logcluster.org/
[2] http://www.e-education.psu.edu/geog583/node/7
[3] https://www.fema.gov/emergency-planning-exercises
[4] https://storymaps.arcgis.com/en/
[5] https://napsg.maps.arcgis.com/apps/StoryMapCrowdsource/index.html?appid=b6ef838e4d26489e8f62102639dc3d91
[6] https://www.arcgis.com/home/index.html
[7] https://storymaps.arcgis.com/en/how-to/
[8] http://storymaps.arcgis.com/en/app-list/
[9] http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/15230406.2017.1370391
[10] http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/4366/3654#p6
[11] https://www.e-education.psu.edu/geog858/sites/www.e-education.psu.edu.geog858/files/Lesson_07/Images/Analysing%20Information%20Diffusion%20in%20Natural%20Hazards%20using%20Retweets%20a%20Case%20Study%20of%202018%20Winter%20Storm%20Diego.pdf