Small Business Innovation Research for Risk-Based Decisions

Riverside and our Asheville-based partners, NEMAC and FernLeaf, have developed web-based tools to connect severe weather with socioeconomic information to help identify vulnerability of assets and to inform risk based decisions. We developed tools to integrate data from National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI) and other National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) data centers with socioeconomic and other custom datasets. Our initial efforts have been to develop tools, services, and datasets to help community Emergency Managers (EMs) and city planners connect severe weather to hazards with socioeconomic information to determine exposure and to inform resiliency planning.

Our recently available Severe Weather Climatology and Data website, sbir.riverside.com, provides publicly available product information, highlights NCEI data, demonstrates our free interactive tools, and points customers to our fee-based products and services. 

Other aspects of the SBIR project are still under development.

1. Severe Weather Risk Assessment. These are free interactive web-based tools that are integrated with the Severe Weather Climatology and Data website. These tools provide integrated access to processing and analysis of publicly available datasets. They visualize the available data sources in meaningful ways to enable users to explore severe weather, the resulting hazards, and their impacts on society.
2. Customized Severe Weather and Multi-Hazard Risk Tools and Services.  These paid products will include software, data, and services customized for communities.

Riverside’s corporate mission is to “improve lives and livelihoods by leveraging environmental intelligence to solve the world’s most challenging water, land, and climate related problems.” By participating in these research projects and through our partnerships with businesses and institutions, we aim to advance the overall understanding of the severity and frequency of extreme events, and provide tools for decision makers in their planning and response.

To insure that our customers can fully apply our tools to their risk analysis needs, we have designed the tools to match the risk process and definitions outlined in the US Climate Resilience Toolkit (toolkit.climate.gov). We assume that most of our customers will be using a risk analysis process similar to the one utilized by the US Climate Resilience Toolkit.