In 2005, the World Bank issued “Natural Disaster Hotspots – A Global Risk Analysis” indicated Taiwan as the most vulnerable place to natural hazards, with 73 percent of population expose to three or more hazards, such as typhoons, flooding, landslides, debris flows, and earthquakes, which often cause series property damages and even life losses. To reduce the damages and losses caused by the natural hazards a Safe Taiwan information system (SATIS) was developed by National Science and Technology Center for Disaster Reduction (NCDR), which includes two subsystems: response operation subsystem for staff members and decision support subsystem for commanders (Su et al., 2010). The SATIS was developed for typhoon hazards and based on the Web-GIS framework. During the typhoon season (from July to September), the staff of the Soil and Water Conservation Bureau (SWCB) in the disaster response center (DRC) are responsible for continuously monitoring the rainfall data provided by the Central Weather Bureau (CWB) and issue warning messages if the rainfall reaches the specified threshold value for debris flow warning. A timely early-warning message allows residents living in the debris flow influenced areas to safely evacuate. To improve the interoperability of heterogeneous geospatial data in the application of debris flow warning, a service-based real-time rainfall grid data and debris data distribution system based on the OGC WMS, WFS, WCS, and WPS standards was developed (Huang and Hong, 2010). The input data of this system includes the basic maps, the real-time information of typhoon and rainfall issued by the Central Weather Bureau, the real-time water information from the Water Resources Agency, and the hazard maps indicating areas of potential landslide, debris flow and flooding made by NCDR. The project was administered by the International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD) under it SERVIR-Himalaya initiative.

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References

Huang, M.-L., Hong, J.-H., 2010. A Geospatial Service Approach towards the Development of a Debris Flow Early-warning Systems. Advances in Information Sciences and Service Sciences Volume 2, Number 2, June 2010. doi: 10.4156/aiss.vol2.issue2.13.

Su, W.-R., Hsu, P.-H., Wu, S.-Y., Lin, F.-T., Chou, H.-C., 2010. Development of Safe Taiwan Information System (SATIS) for Typhoon Early Warning in Taiwan. Systemics, cybernetics and informatics 8 (4), 1690-4524.