Hurricane Planning and Improvements

The United States is at risk from hurricanes that could affect human life and health, devastate large areas, and disrupt local, regional, and national economies. The accuracy of hurricane weather forecasts increases as landfall approaches, but there is an associated decrease in the length of time available to analyze impacts and prepare consequence mitigation strategies. This NISAC work is designed to improve the speed and accuracy with which NISAC can assess projected hurricane impacts.

Contributing to the Nation's Prepardeness

The Hurricane Planning and Improvements Project provides guidance on the infrastructure impacts of concern that may result from hurricane landfall in the United States. The project contributes to the nation’s preparedness from catastrophic hurricane landfall by drawing upon models and expertise across NISAC to produce effective consequence estimates.

Improving Hurricane Analysis Tools

Several improvements to the hurricane analysis tools are being made to automate processes and revise output: reducing the time it takes to perform analyses, reducing potential inconsistencies and errors, and providing additional relevant information. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration wind speed forecasts for the continental United States are automatically downloaded, processed to extract the maximum sustained wind speeds, and used as needed for analyses. NISAC will continue to improve the geospatial analysis tool, FASTMap, to provide maps and information of greater value to analysts and under a wider range of disruption conditions.

NISAC will also integrate more fragility information into the Hydra framework to allow for quicker and more consistent estimates of damage caused by a hurricane. The Hydra framework will also be used to perform initial analyses of infrastructure assets.

Working on Hazards and Planning Scenarios

NISAC works with incident response and coordination groups within DHS IP to improve and tailor NISAC reports and analyses to the needs of product recipients and to determine information needs for various hazards and planning scenarios. A set of critical hazards and planning scenarios, focusing on the National Planning Scenarios and other likely disruptions, will guide expansion of existing analytic tools and capabilities.