APRIL 3, 2015--Staff from OR&R's Emergency Response Division (ERD) and the Assessment and Restoration Division (ARD) gave presentations at the Coastal GeoTools conference in Charleston, S.C. the week of March 30, 2015.

Jill Petersen from ERD presented on the post Hurricane Sandy Environmentally Sensitivity Index (ESI) development spanning from Maine to South Carolina. The offshore and inland extent of the ESI maps is increasing, new human-use and management features are being added, and some additional attributes are being collected and mapped. These improved ESI data will serve well for planning and response to other environmental hazards and disasters in the near future.

Jay Coady of ARD presented the OR&R data warehouse, DIVER (Data Integration, Visualization, Exploration, and Reporting) focusing on the challenge of managing and integrating many datasets from numerous separate collection systems with varying levels of organization and documentation.

Chander Ganesen, one of ARD's lead developers presented the Environmental Response Management Application (ERMA), a NOAA Decision Support system used to respond to a range of Environmental disasters. In 2014 the ERMA system was migrated into the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), and altered to leverage a range of Amazon services. These changes allow ERMA to scale based on demand, achieve a higher level of reliability while complying with a range of Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA) standards.

Also from ARD, George Graettinger presented on the application of Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) to the Deepwater Natural Resource Damage Assessment (NRDA). SAR data have provided valuable information that has been used throughout the response and NRDA processes and are being evaluated for a variety of future response and assessment efforts.

The Coastal GeoTools conference is a cooperative industry and NOAA technical conference highlighting advances in technology and data for coastal environmental sciences and provides an excellent opportunity for multi-agency and industry partners to meet and share innovative approaches to these issues.

Please contact George.Graettinger@noaa.gov for further information.

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