Application of spatial visualization for probabilistic hurricanes risk assessment to build environment

Hurricanes have caused extensive economic losses and social disruption in the past two decades in the United States. A key component for improving building and infrastructure practices and public planning to reduce the economic losses due to hurricanes and their social impact is the ability to predict the expected damage that such events cause in buildings and other structures as well as the uncertainties in such predictions. Federal, state and county emergency management officers need an effective real-time tool to facilitate the decision regarding when evacuate should begin and who should evacuate before a hurricane, as long as how to timely conduct post-disaster relief. Modern Internet-based geospatial tools can be effectively used to provide decision makers with real-time data, model results, and geospatial reference datasets. Probabilistic risk assessment model combined with spatial distributed visualization is proposed in this paper for more efficient hurricane hazard mitigation through risk informed communication.