A GIS-based Decision Support System for Forecasting, Monitoring, and Assessment of Hazardous Chemical Accidents on the Coast

A GIS-based decision support system was proposed and implemented in this study for management of hazardous chemical spill accident (DSS-HCS). It could forecast the dynamics of the pollution on the coast and warn the regions with high risk of being polluted in the early stage of the accident. Afterword, it could assist the assessment of the ecologic damages. The development of such a tool integrated various computer and computational techniques including. Net programming, GIS, web, database, numerical modeling and etc. Linking with GIS, a desktop-based decision support tool was developed to provide the user interactive environment for simulating the pollutants transport, hazards mapping, and ecologic damage assessment. A web-based data portal was also implemented to publish the results of forecasting and monitoring. A study case in Hangzhou Bay, China was selected to demonstrate the applicability of the developed DSS-HCS. The study results showed that the proposed DSS-HCS could not only assist the decision making in response to the accident with awareness of the risk, but also offer technical supports for ecologic damage assessment and compensation claim. Through integration of the forecasting, monitoring and assessment of marine pollution into a GIS environment, various types of results (e.g. hazardous maps, reports, queries and etc) could be obtained and thus the efficiency of the management process were improved.