The COASTAL Act Wind and Water Event Database (CWWED) developed on Amazon’s Web Services (AWS) Cloud Platform

The Consumer Option for an Alternative System to Allocate Losses (COASTAL) Act was signed into law on July 6, 2012, to help the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) determine the extent to which wind vs. water was the cause of damage in cases where little tangible evidence exists beyond a building’s foundation following a tropical cyclone. This determination is needed for the proper and timely adjustment of insurance claims, as water damage is covered by FEMA’s National Flood Insurance Program, while wind damage is covered by private insurers. The COASTAL Act requires the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) to produce detailed “Post Storm Assessments (PSA)” in the aftermath of a damaging tropical cyclone that strikes the U.S. or its territories. NOAA’s National Center for Environmental Information (NCEI) in partnership with the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES) and NOAA’s National Weather Service (NWS) is developing the COASTAL Wind and Water Event Database (CWWED) and Geographical Web-based mapping Services (GWS) that support the COASTAL Act. CWWED serves as an interactive database that provides access to all data used by the Named Storm Event Model (NSEM) to derive PSAs and serves as an accessible repository for the PSA output so it can be referenced by all relevant stakeholders. CWWED receives the NSEM input from NOAA, the United States Geological Survey (USGS), and academic members of the Digital Hurricane Consortium (DHC) as well as the derived PSA data products that are generated from the NSEM. To meet this need, CWWED was developed on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud platform. The CWWED Architecture includes an Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS + PostgreSQL) and THREDDS Data Server (TDS) and leverages AWS Elastic Cloud Computing and Open Source Geographical Information Services tools. This presentation details the functionality of the CWWED and GWS, on AWS and highlights the partnerships involved in ensuring the CWWED is successfully implemented on a cloud platform as part of the COASTAL Act process.

"For Official Use Only. The CWWED and GWS are pre-decisional information not releasable outside US Government and therefore not considered the final solution for COASTAL Act implementation".