The respected journal Natural Hazards has just published a new paper describing the process of and results from creating the ARkStorm Scenario, released in January 2011, to highlight the way scientists prepare useful information for emergency managers and policy makers related to natural hazards. In this case, it was storms and flooding. The atmospheric team working on the scenario, led by Mike Dettinger (USGS) & Marty Ralph (NOAA), decided that designing a “worst-case” scenario would just be asking for dissent, and so they took lessons from the past (along with recent advances in our understanding of California’s worst storms) and came up with something that was worse than any other 20th century storm. In 2008, the USGS Multi Hazards Demonstration Project began working to develop and provide considerable detail for a scenario that would help emergency managers to plan and prepare for the something like the worst winter storm you can think of for California. The completed scenario was released at the ARkStorm Summit and continues to be used today by various public and private sector entities for emergency planning and policy purposes.
A PDF of the Natural Hazards paper can be found at http://www.springerlink.com/content/j111348544848467/fulltext.pdf
