Prof. Becker has been working with a URI team to bring local scale, high-resolution, storm models to emergency managers in Rhode Island. In partnership with Isaac Ginis (GSO) and Pam Rubinoff (CRC), the team has spent the last five years developing a new approach that couples qualitative data collected from infrastructure managers into numerical storm models. The end result is a mapper dashboard that emergency managers can use to get notified about areas of concern as a storm comes up the coast. The initial pilot project was conducted in Westerly, with a follow on project recently completed in the City of Providence. This work was recently featured in an article in the Westerly Sun. In the coming year, Becker and his team plan to scale the system to the state.

Figure 1. Example of prototype dashboard developed in Providence pilot project