Spatial Data Architecture for Meteorological/Hydrological Hazards
and Associated Risks Management in Romania
G. Stancalie, V. Craciunescu, A. Nertan, E. Toma
National Meteorological Administration, Bucharest, Romania
The availability of high quality, rapidly accessible and secure geo-information is the
basis of rational decision making for risk management and disaster prevention. In the
last years there is a clear aim of most of European countries to promote scientific
excellence and innovation to advance knowledge and understanding in the field of risk
management.
Currently the European countries, included Romania, have very different information
systems, operational procedures and communication systems that do not fit well with
each other. The current trend is to address these issues and to develop software
platforms that improve interoperability between civil protection systems. The intention
is to design, validate, and demonstrate a generic integrated risk management open
system to support the entire chain of activities from the initial assessment to postdisaster recovery. The European initiative INSPIRE (Infrastructure for Spatial
Information in Europe) aims at harmonizing geospatial information across European
countries at local, regional, national, and European level in order to support policies
with a territorial dimension. This will offer a good opportunity for major improvements
in disaster preparedness. Currently different international projects are working on
developing service architectures for risk management based on open standards (SAFER,
ORCHESTRA, HAZNETH, etc).
The paper presents the main results of some Romanian projects (INSPAM, SIGUR, and
RISCASAT) for initiation and development of an interoperable framework able to
contribute to a national spatial data infrastructure for hydro-meteorological hazards and
associated risks management by following the European initiatives of this domain
(INSPIRE, GMES). This initiative, supported by some national and European - funded
projects, was materialized by the organization of a unit in the National Meteorological
Administration, able to perform technical and economical assessment for developing the
spatial data infrastructure for monitoring extreme meteorological/hydrological
phenomena. The project objectives are the following:
 providing the inventory and the analysis of the current situation for set-up and
management of the spatial data distribution in Romania;
 specifications elaboration for the national spatial data infrastructure targeting the
hydro-meteorological hazards and associated risks;
 set-up an distributed inter-institutional experimental model for the management of
the spatial data related with the extreme hydro-meteorological phenomena;
 test the experimental model using several study cases (2008 trans-boundary flood
events in North-Eastern Romania, Ukraine and Republic of Moldavia, drought episodes
of 2007 and 2008);
 design an open service-oriented architecture for meteorological/hydrological
hazards and risk management. Special attention will be paid to provide a solution for the
combination of spatial and non-spatial data and services. The architecture followed up
the European projects, INSPIRE, ORCHESTRA, and GMES;
 design thematic services useful for various meteorological/hydrological risk
management applications based on the above mentioned architecture;
 validate the proposed architecture and thematic services in a multi-risk scenarios
 apply software standards for risk management applications. In particular, the de
facto standard of the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) and the standards of ISO and
CEN;

elaborate recommendations concerning the improvement of the Romanian spatial data
infrastructure for meteorological/hydrological hazards and associated risks management, to the
trans-European level;
In the framework of the INSPAM, SIGUR and /RISCASAT projects was designed an
open, generic, evolutionary and sustainable architecture for hydro-meteorological
extreme phenomena management services, building upon the INSPIRE
recommendations.
In this respect a Web-based Information System for Trans-boundary Flood Management
(FLOODSAT) was already implemented in the Romania. FLOODSAT is a dedicated
on-line system, based on satellite data and GIS technology, for flood related geo-spatial
information management. The GIS and satellite–derived data configured for Web uses,
is based on a three-tiered components:

a spatial data server that can efficiently communicate with a Web server and is able
of sending and receiving requests for different types of data from a Web browser
environment;

a mapping file format that can be embedded into a Web page;

a Web-based application in which maps can be viewed and queried by an enduser/client via a Web browser.
The main functions of the FLOODSAT are:
- acquisition, storage, analysis and interpretation of data;
- management and exchange of raster and vector graphic information, and also of
related attribute data for the flood monitoring activities;
- handling and preparation for a rapid data access;
- updating the information (temporal modification);
- data restoring, including the elaboration of thematic documents;
- generation of value-added information (complex indices for flood prevention, risk
maps);
- distribution of the derived products to authorities, institutions, media, etc.
The entire FLOODSAT infrastructure was built using free and open source software:
PostGIS (geospatial data storage), GeoNetwork Opensource (geospatial data catalog
and metadata editor), GeoServer (standard geospatial server for serving data via WMS
and WFS), OpenLayers (client webmapping application).
The data registered into the system is published through standard compliant services
(WMS, WFS, GeoRSS, KML) and can be accessed/consumed by users via a thin web
client or a thick desktop client , or even through 3D Virtual Globe applications like
Google Earth.
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Another important result of the INSPAM, SIGUR, and RISCASAT projects concern the
improvement of the interoperability between institutions, through the development of a
set of specifications that support interoperable services (including spatial and not-spatial
schemas) and incorporated in a technical guidelines document.
End-users such as members of public agencies or private companies interested in
thematic applications which have been built according to and using the proposed
services will be able to:
- share and integrate data in standard format from a multitude of sources that can be
transformed into useful information.
- facilitate the integration of their current technological solutions as the
interoperability of services will be enabled.
- render knowledge in different multi-media forms: text, speech, graphs, images,
maps, etc.
- provide better services to the end users based upon de “facto or de jure” standards.
- use efficient interoperable services that can be easily integrated in the current
technological reality.
- coherently handle both spatial and non-spatial data to assure the interchange of
information
- among different actors at different levels from local to national.
- adopt multi-format presentation of services through multiple content publishing
channels and interactive services.
The results will help the harmonization of the technical underpinning of Environmental
Management and e-government by integrating the results and recommendations of
previous and current European projects and initiatives. Also these research results will
influence the development of the Romanian standards for risk management so that
European requirements are appropriately reflected in forthcoming standards in support
of sustainable business processes and production workflows.
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