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SpatialNews.com Press Release
SAIC Establishes Emergency Mapping and Analysis Center
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MCLEAN, Va., April 11 -- In order to facilitate critical decision-making before, during and after a catastrophic event, Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC) has established an Emergency Mapping and Analysis Center (EMAC) located in their new Advanced Radar Research and Development and Production Center, based in Melbourne, Fla.
The EMAC will help the state of Florida enhance its preparations for hurricanes and other disasters by allowing the Emergency Operations Centers' Incident Management Teams to visualize events from a geographic perspective. The intent is to help incident managers rapidly direct their resources to the areas in which they are most needed.
According to the Radar Center's Senior Systems Engineer, Dave Bookman, the center will use optical remote sensing and Synthetic Aperture Radar data from satellites to track damage status on the Earth's surface. "The optical data provides a high-quality, color image base layer of the Earth's surface and the radar waves can penetrate cloud cover and most other adverse weather conditions," said Bookman. "With this information we can assess the differences in topography, land cover or structures that result from damage and then these differences can be rapidly depicted in map form."
The EMAC's first project, with the Brevard County Emergency Operations Center in Rockledge, Fla., is already underway. In this project the Center will develop change detection maps of the entire county and then use these maps as a data layer within the SAIC-developed Consequence Assessment Toolset (CATS). Used in tandem with CATS, the maps will create depictions of the local environment that can be used to perform rapid hazard calculations for emergency responders.
"These tools assist in real-time disaster analysis," said John Thomas, SAIC senior vice president and general manager of the Operational Intelligence Solutions Business Unit. "The EMAC will facilitate the calculation and assessment of consequences by converting the geographic distribution of hazards into probabilities of the occurrence of certain events, including the extent of loss of life."
In creating CATS, SAIC correlated a wealth of historical data on structural damage from atmospheric nuclear tests with hurricane gust characteristics to create a robust damage assessment methodology. SAIC melded this methodology with the power of geographical information systems and demographic and infrastructure data to produce a tool that can be used to help anticipate the consequences of not only hurricanes, but of terrorist events as well.
SAIC is the largest employee-owned research and engineering company in the United States, with more than 43,000 employees in over 150 cities worldwide. For the fiscal year ended January 31, 2005, the company reported annual revenues of $7.2 billion. SAIC engineers and scientists solve complex technical problems in national security, homeland security, energy, the environment, space, telecommunications, health care, and logistics. SAIC: FROM SCIENCE TO SOLUTIONS(TM)
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