The release of dangerous chemicals in the environment, be it accidental or intentional, has serious consequences on the environment and human health. In order to be prepared, to actively respond or to entirely recover an incident, the SEVESEO project aimed at developing a decision-making tool to support the risk management for industries working with products that are posing a threat to the population and the environment within a framework using remotely sensed information.
Scenario Based Decision Support System
The SEVESEO decision making system is built around different pollutant dispersion models1. These models are used for fixing geographical limits of the areas of influence, and for predicting concentration and impact patterns in time. The models will be run as predictive tools for a set of accident scenario's. This information enables operators to define risk zones and perimeters and to facilitate rapid response.
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Incident: Actual or potential incident location, substance, container, type of release
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Scenario: pathway to go from incident to consequence (includes information about the models that are used to calculate dispersion and effects on environment)
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Consequences regarding atmosphere, surface or ground water, soil
(1) Dispersion modelling
Dispersion models allow to fix geographical limits of an accident as well as to forecast future impacted areas. Dispersion models do exist in many different versions (simple analytical models to complex 3-dimensional models) and implementations. Within SEVESEO focus is put on the environmental impacts.
Within SEVESEO, source term strength and atmospheric as well as soil dispersion models have been integrated within SEVESEO by means of web processing services.
Intended users
A complete assessment of a simulation of an accident involving hazardous chemicals or an actual emergency response to an accident requires a system that rapidly and accurately models the source term and the subsequent transport of the chemical of concern trough different media. This information enables potential users to prepare or respond as accurately as possible.
The intended end-users are all the possible actors involved in emergency planning:
- Local, regional and national authorities
- Emergency teams (medical teams, police and fire brigades)
- Civil protection
- Environmental agencies
"A decision making tool for a better risk identification and a more strategic vision of the intervention planning."
- Mrs Monique BERNAERTS – National Crisis Center of Belgium
"SEVESEO will help determining much easier the risk zones, as well the eventual damage caused on humans and goods. SEVESEO will help to have a much better overview of the immediate application of security measures like the execution of specific actions (mobilization of intervention forces, occupation of perimeters and prior control post) as well as the follow up of the evolution of the incident."
- Mr Jean-Yves SCHUL – Coordination Manager for the Federal Police, Belgium
Remote Sensing
The SEVESEO system uses remote sensing that can be used to obtain visual information, surface characteristics (land cover/use, state and abundance of vegetation, topography) as well as atmospheric composition. The phase of a disaster in which the use of remote sensing proves to be the most interesting depends on the platform, for example:
- Very high resolution Quickbird data for site viewing to support decision making in the response phase.
- SPOT4 HRVIR data to produce land use maps. These maps are also used for the determination of the surface roughness parameter. This parameter plays an important role in the atmospheric modeling of pollutants around the accident.