Rome -- As tsunami warnings go out across the Pacific in the wake of the massive earthquake in Japan, the latest information on the disaster and its effects is appearing in real time on www.hewsweb.org, a comprehensive humanitarian early warning web platform which has just gone live.
The Humanitarian Early Warning Service platform, which anyone can consult, collects and displays critical information from a range of high quality sources, including seismic data from the US Geological Survey. The new platform was launched on Thursday, after an extensive overhaul.
"It's come just in time," says Amy Horton, head of WFP's Emergency Preparedness division. "People are downloading maps and consulting the most current information." A dedicated tsunami page is currently being constructed.
Hewsweb carries the latest maps from emergency and disaster zones. Right now, there are detailed seismic maps of the Japan earthquake and of the provinces of the Philippines that have been placed on tsunami alert.
Of the countries where WFP is operational, those most at risk from the tsunami are the Philippines, Indonesia and Timor Leste. WFP’s Humanitarian Response Depot in Subang, Malaysia, is on standby.
For rainfall and flooding, HEWS brings together the formidable resources of NASA, the Dartmouth Flood Observatory in the United States and the academic research institute ITHACA from the influential Polytechnic of Turin, in Italy. These and other leaders in their fields refresh the information in their systems every fifteen minutes, which means that HEWS is extremely current.
WFP developed HEWS, which was originally set up in 2004, on behalf of all the members of an expert group known as the Inter-Agency Standing Committee’s Sub-Working Group on Preparedness.
Users will be able to overlay several hazards – such as flooding and rainfall forecasts - onto a single homepage map to create their own scenario and preparedness plans. Or they can input the longitude and latitude of where they are to monitor any hazards around them within the vicinity of their choice.
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