Geoinformation for Disaster and Risk Management - ISPRS

Health alerts
As an example of health interventions, the
Albuquerque Public Schools (APS) in New Mexico,
USA has developed an asthma action plan and
standing orders for intervening, mitigating, and
treating registered asthmatic students. The action
plan has three well defined categories of symptoms.
Mild symptoms are addressed by the classroom
teacher; moderate symptoms are addressed by a
school nurse or other medical provider; and severe
symptoms are addressed by emergency response
personnel. These categories provide a health basis
for dust forecasts that can be e-mailed, faxed, text
messaged, or twittered to the APS Nursing Service,
and sent to print and broadcast media.
Forty-eight-hour forecasts of atmospheric dust are
produced daily and made available at
http://phairs.unm.edu, and
http://nmtracking.unm.edu. Figure 4 captures a
storm crossing southeast Arizona and southwest
New Mexico on Jan 6-8, 2008. Individuals at Wilcox
and Silver City could view an animation of the dust
forecast that ran from 5:00pm (local time) on Jan 6th
through midnight on Jan 8th. At left is a clip from the
animation centered on the hour of peak dust
concentration. The graphs at right show the peak
hour and magnitudes for Wilcox Playa (blue curve)
and Silver City (red curve). There is a precursor,
lower concentration episode at both locations, but
Wilcox was eventually hit with three high
concentration episodes over the forecast period.
School nurses in the Albuquerque Public Schools
prefer a dust alert system that obviates referring to
websites or interpreting graphs. They favor a daily
written synopsis of dust and air quality conditions
across the school District.
Figure 4: (left), Dust patterns at 1pm on Jan 7th. High concentrations are red and orange colors; low concentrations are
green and yellow colors. (right), Timing of peak dust concentrations. The pattern at left is for the hour shown on the
vertical bar at right.
Using Figure 4(right) as an example, a synopsis of
dust forecasts might read as follows:
�Wilcox and vicinity: For January 6-8, expect
moderate windblown dust late in the evening on
the 6th, dissipating gradually throughout the
evening and early morning hours but increasing
and peaking in concentration to unhealthy levels
between noon and 3pm on the 7th. There is a
chance for moderate dust between 6 and 8am on
the 8th.
�Silver City and vicinity: For January 6-8,
expect conditions as in Wilcox on the 6th. For the
7th, expect a sharp rise in dust concentration to
unhealthy levels between noon and 7pm, and
remaining high until after midnight. Expect
diminishing dust on the 8th.
Epidemiology
Epidemiologists can gain access to archives of dust
simulations in the southwestern USA at
http://nmtracking.unm.edu. Products are integrated
into client interfaces to visualize raster images
derived from the modeling system and to combine
them with routine GIS operations. These data
represent a step toward examining geographically
explicit dust patterns for analyses of hospital
admissions, or doctor visits that might have resulted
from chronic, high level dust exposures.
49