Extreme weather conditions dashboard

• Autor(a) principal: Freitas, Luís Carlos Gonçalves
• Data de Publicação: 2022
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10400.13/4057
• topic: Extreme weather events; Weather events; Conditions dashboard; Warning systems; Informatics Engineering; .; Faculdade de Ciências Exatas e da Engenharia; Domínio/Área Científica::Engenharia e Tecnologia::Engenharia Eletrotécnica, Eletrónica e Informática; Domínio/Área Científica::Ciências Naturais::Ciências da Terra e do Ambiente; Domínio/Área Científica::Engenharia e Tecnologia::Engenharia do Ambiente

Our planet Earth is changing due to the action of Man. Several factors influence the functioning of our planet, such as the constant need for human evolution, population growth and many others. Due to this, more and more we have extreme atmospheric events. There is an increasing need to become aware of this problem and take action both in terms of what we can do to prevent the destruction of our planet and prevent when these extreme events happen. The objective of this thesis is based on this last point. To combat the lack of a system in Portugal capable of helping the general public in extreme weather conditions, we created an atmospheric dashboard. The goals were that this dashboard was simple to use, open to the general public, with high spacial resolution (currently the smallest area used is the municipality, here we use an even smaller geographic area), flexible, and scalable so that new data sources or new variables could be added to the existing ones in the future without affecting the correct functioning of the system. This system uses meteorological data and relates them to other variables such as the age of the population, the thermal conditions of buildings, number of deaths, among others. The combination of all these data leads to the calculation of a risk index associated with each zone. The results show that the application has excellent portability, as it was easily installed on another device thanks to the virtualization offered by Docker. In terms of scalability, although did no tests at this level. However, during the application development, there was the need to add new data sources. Considering that the application is modularised, there was no problem with the existing or new data sources. Users see great potential in the application in terms of usability for prevention by the population during extreme weather events. Another positive aspect was that they liked the layout of the elements in the interface, namely the fact that the map area is the most prominent and most visible area in the dashboard. It also helped us get some feedback on what could be improved, such as using more distinct colors to present the level of risk or even improving the connection between the different views of the application. The results are positive and encourage further development of the application, applying the suggestions obtained from user testing.