The traditional and most common way of viewing risk results (i.e. contours) from a quantitative risk analysis (QRA) study of a hazardous facility is in plan (i.e. birds eye) view on a location map (see Figure 1).
Figure 1: Traditional plan view of risk contours from a Quantitative Risk Analysis study. Each iso-contour represents a level of risk with a peak in the innermost circle and the level of risk reducing outwards.
This is the standard approach for example when using Safeti, the industry standard software package for onshore quantitative risk analysis (QRA).
Viewing results in this fashion is very useful as consumers of risk information can immediately see what areas are affected by what levels of risk and vice versa.
But sometimes, it is desirable to view things from a new perspective and in a more dynamic and engaging way i.e. pan around the picture, view contours in the horizontal plane at street level etc.
This can be done by exporting risk contour results from Safeti and viewing them in Google Earth Pro.
Safeti includes GIS (Geographical Information system) capability that allows results to be exported and viewed in other GIS based systems (e.g. Google Earth Pro). Contour data can be exported as shapefiles (with a “.shp” extension) and brought into Google Earth Pro. The GIS system will need to be set up properly to ensure that the contours are located in the right place.
The video (click to play) below shows an example of where this has been done using completely fictitious risk contour data on an arbitrary location in Asia (same data shown in Figure 1). It was made using the movie maker tool in Google Earth Pro.
Looks great and gives a different perspective to the results.
Authors: Kenny Shaba and Colin Hickey