GIS Natural Hazards Mitigation

Upcoming Events

  • Steering Committee meetings occur on the second Tuesday of every month from 3-4 p.m.
  • Open Office meetings occur on the fourth Thursday of every month from 2-3 p.m. These meetings are open to any interested future users from state organizations. Reach out to a project team member at the bottom of this page to receive an invitation!

Resources

 

 

Progress to date - Nov. 1st, 2022:

What's new

As of November 1st, 2022, the Natural Hazards Mitigation (NHM) project remains in the execution phase and is on schedule. The project has been focused on key project documentation deliverables and onboarding agencies. The project team will be presenting an update on the project at Washington State Joint Agency GIS Day on November 16th, 2022.

Current status:

  • The project team is focused on drafting a data sharing agreement (DSA) framework for the platform. Meetings have been held with the WaTech Contracts and Procurement team, Office of Privacy and Data Protection (OPDP), and various agencies to understand the needs surround DSAs.
  • A legislative progress report on the development of the platform has been drafted and is under review by the Executive team at WaTech.
  • Additional agencies have been onboarded via ArcGIS Distributed Collaborations and are in the process of testing out specific data sharing use cases through GeoPortal 2.0.
  • A first draft for the Organizational Change Management Plan has been created and is being reviewed by the project team.
  • GeoPortal 2.0 "Open Office" meetings are continuing monthly and are open to any interested current or future stakeholders. See the "Upcoming events" section for more information.

Project achievements:

  • Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) has been fully implemented as the authentication method for all GeoPortal 2.0 environments (PROD/DEV).
  • Full system backups are now in-place for the production and development environments.
  • Seven Distributed Collaborations now exist between State Agencies and GeoPortal 2.0.
  • Category 3 spatial data can now be fully supported on GeoPortal, the team is awaiting final approval from the Office of Cybersecurity (OCS).

Background

WaTech was tasked by the Legislature to develop a common data-sharing platform for public organizations in Washington to host and share sensitive natural hazards mitigation geospatial data. There is no common platform for state, local and higher-education organizations to share existing state geospatial data on natural hazards risks. A lack of data in standardized and compatible formats results in organizations maintaining individual sets of data, creating redundant processes and leads to inconsistencies in how data is reported.

This project will provide consistent natural hazards data for use by state, local and higher-education organizations to support state hazard risks and resilience mapping and analysis. Legislation has identified $724,000 in funding to create this common platform and has established an expectation for the data platform to be available by June 30, 2023.

The following organizations were identified by the state Legislature and are members of the project steering committee and customer advisory group: Department of Ecology, Department of Natural Resources, Sea Grant Washington, Climate Impacts Group, Office of the Insurance Commissioner, State Department of Health and the State Water Research Center.

More information

This project is being led by WaTech's Geospatial Program Office. If you would like to be a part of this project and/or want to know more, please reach out to one of the following project team members: