Increasing the effectiveness of Early Warning

The effective implementation of early warning is one of the best investments for disaster prevention and mitigation. In the last decade, we have witnessed strong efforts and progress towards better risk detection, monitoring and prediction. However, the best warnings are ineffective if they cannot be distributed in a timely way and targeted to people at risk. With the evolvement of new Information and Communication Technologies, we have new opportunities and face new challenges for improving classical warning processes. Based on our experience and research results from two user-centered hydro-meteorological Early Warning Systems (EWS) we present an approach for context-aware alerting that can increase considerably the effectiveness of warning. Furthermore, we introduce an applied evaluation model for the effectiveness of an EWS.