GIS Natural Hazards Mitigation

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Progress to date – This project was completed in June 2023.

As of June 1st, the Natural Hazards Mitigation (NHM) project is winding down as a formal WaTech IT project/initiative and is moving into Maintenance and Operations. The team's focus is onboarding new users and data, as well as cleaning up any remaining documentation tasks. The platform is live and welcomes new users who would like access to sensitive geospatial data and those related to natural hazards.  

Project achievements:

  • The GeoPortal 2.0 platform is live with over 55 users from 18 different State Organizations.
  • 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).
  • Geographic redundancy for the Platform has been fully implemented. Failover testing from Olympia to the Quincy Datacenter was successful.

Background

The Office of the Chief Information Officer (OCIO) 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 the OCIO 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: