About HERA

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HERA is an experimental decision-support tool designed to assist local and regional organizations in planning and preparedness for hazardous and extreme meteorological and climatological events.  The tool provides decision support through:

• Hazard data visualization in county maps and annual tables
• County-level counts and probabilities of hazardous and extreme events
• Comparisons across counties

Currently, the tool uses historical data to provide information by county in North Carolina and South Carolina, and may soon be expanded to other southeastern states.

To navigate through HERA, click on the Hazard tabs or move the navigation slider that appears under tabs when hovering over them. On each page, you may select State, Years, and Subcategories depending on the hazard of interest. To view a Count of the number of hazard events that have occurred and the Probability that at least one event of that hazard will happen in a year, hover over a county on the map. The default Count and Probability are calculated for all years, but will change if the user changes the range of years on the sliding time bar. All information on a page can be displayed for a particular county by clicking on the county of interest in the map. Multiple counties may be selected by holding down the Command key (Apple) or the Control key (PC). To return to an all-county view, click on an area outside the mapped area but inside the map box, such as the Atlantic Ocean. Occasionally, you may experience slow load times.

Hazard definitions and more information about the data used in HERA can be found on the Glossary tab at the end of the Hazard tabs. Additional map layers and a dashboard where multiple hazards can be displayed side-by-side are coming soon.