White Papers
Explore challenges facing communities with respect to climate change, and trends in applying solutions to overcome them
Big Spatial Data and Climate Risk Management
Canadians can rightly take pride as the birthplace of Geospatial Analytics. Roger Tomlinson (1933-2014) a British emigrant to Canada, is generally regarded as the “Father of Geographic Information Systems”, who pioneered the architecture for what was to become our modern digital geospatial analytics platforms. Many communities now rely on GIS for routine management of municipal assets such as water distribution, sanitary collection, roads, sidewalks, forests, and buildings. The benefits of systematic, spatial organization of data are too great to ignore as we live in a world defined by the x, y and z coordinates of everything and “big” spatial data is now everywhere.
The next frontier in municipal asset management is harnessing the power of big data and high performance computing for climate risk management and investment attraction. Climate risk is undeniably growing but so is our analytic and engineering capability here at SSE.