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'OK-FIRST' State's emergency managers on cutting edge of predicting, responding to severe weather
The Norman (Okla.) Transcript, Norman, Oklahoma, Sunday, July 20, 1997, by Randall Turk, Transcript Business Editor
Oklahoma weather may never be less changeable, but at least it's getting more predictable throughout the state.
A unique program at the University of Oklahoma has produced its first class of local emergency managers trained to detect and respond to sever weather patterns. The "OK-FIRST" program promises to pay off in preserving human life and property by making the detection of threatening weather more site-specific.
"Oklahoma's First-response Information Resource System using Telecommunications" relies on the state's "Mesonet" system of 114 automated weather stations and 14 NEXRAD Doppler radars in and around the state. The weather information is transmitted by computer to emergency managers from the Oklahoma Climatological Survey, using the state's new OneNet system. Satellite data, the latest computer forecast model of the atmosphere, and other information from the National Weather Service are also available.
"Because of OK-FIRST and the Mesonet, we're equipping emergency managers in Oklahoma to have no peers anywhere in the world," said OCS director Kenneth Crawford. "Other states are beginning to look to us as the model system for response to weather emergencies."
A little over two years ago the state received grants through the state Regents for Higher Education to start the OneNet program. There are now about 45 OneNet "hub sites" around the state where users can dial locally to get on the Internet.
"We have a program for the public safety community on how to interpret weather data and how to apply it," says OCS assistant director Renee McPherson. "The OU infrastructure keeps them learning through refresher workshops."
A recent workshop at OU trained the first 22 emergency managers from throughout the state, Wichita Falls and Fort Smith. "The goal is not to make safety officials weather forecasters, but to give them the opportunity to understand what the weather situation is," McPherson said. The new capabilities also will speed response to range fires, hazardous material spills and other emergencies.
The Climatological Survey has a paging service to automatically notify OK-FIRST stations of severe winds and send all the weather service watches and warnings. "We want to improve programming in the website to flash to users what's happening in their counties," McPherson said.
The OCS has a software development group that improves and reissues software every six months. The next software update is scheduled August 15. Mesonet imagery is handled in a unique way.
"Normally, agencies take weather data and make graphic images to place on web pages, but it takes a lot of programs to create images and considerable disk space to store them," McPherson said. "So our philosophy isn't just send to data and make images at the user end."
Turnaround time for NEXRAD weather radar data is just a few seconds. The OCS has added interactivity, permitting the user to click a certain area for more detail. "Emergency managers have a lot of flexibility in what they want to see," McPherson said. "On the same piece of software we can send them on to other sources of information."
Over the next six-month cycle, the OCS plans software that will provide access to the same data set over a time series. For example, wind direction and temperature drop will be integrated from Mesonet and NEXRAD data.
OK-First was funded through a $549,000 grant from the Telecommunications and Information Infrastructure Assistance Program, and agency of the U.S. Department of Commerce. Matching funds were donated by the University of Oklahoma, the state Regents for Higher Education, the Oklahoma Law Enforcement Telecommunications System, and Unisys Weather Information Services.
OK-First will expand this fall and next spring, when other groups of public safety officials will receive training.
"In the first two years OK-FIRST be able to touch only a fraction of communities in the state," McPherson said. "Perhaps we'll get more support."
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