Officials in Georgia’s Fulton County are always on the lookout for severe weather events like tornadoes and lightning storms. Networks of sensors and Intel-based servers turn real-time data into just-in-time alerts.
Fast-moving storms move through the Atlanta metropolitan area, generating hundreds of lightning strikes and causing fires. A deadly tornado outbreak sweeps across the southeastern U.S., causing extensive damage and injuries and forcing evacuations in downtown Atlanta.
These severe weather events took place in 2008, but they can occur frequently in a metropolitan county that’s home to more than a million people in an area spanning 534 square miles.
According Matthew Kallmyer, Director of the Atlanta-Fulton County Emergency Management Agency (AFCEMA), weather varies dramatically across different parts of Fulton County, and advance warning is critical.
AFCEMA worked with Earth Networks* to install 53 of the company’s automated weather stations, generating a flood of real-time data on wind velocity, barometric pressure, heat index, lightning strikes and other parameters.
Servers based on multi-core Intel® Xeon® processors use sophisticated modeling software to turn the raw data into weather alerts for schools, first responders and other subscribers. Fast processing performance adds up to shorter response times. And that can be critically important when lives and property are at stake.
Read the full case study:
http://edc.intel.com/Amazing-Places/#a-flood-of-realtime-data-for-severe-weather-alerts
