Running a what-if scenario

Scenario Planning answers “what if it happened here?” before it does. You choose a peril, a size and a place; Calchis draws the impact zones and counts the people, structures and critical facilities inside them.

Place it

Pick one of your monitored areas under Center on one of your areas, or type a latitude and longitude. Then choose the peril and its size: magnitude for an earthquake, sustained wind in knots for a hurricane, acres for a wildfire. The name is optional and is what the result and any exercise are called.

Where the zones come from

Earthquake and wildfire zones are exactly what the live map would draw for a real event of that size, from the same ring model. A rehearsal therefore uses the same picture you would work from on the day.

Hurricane zones are illustrative, and the result says so. Live hurricane rings come only from the National Hurricane Center’s published wind radii, and a hypothetical storm has none. The scenario scales circles to the wind speed instead. Real wind fields are lopsided and usually smaller, so use these for rehearsal, not for placing resources.

Who is inside

Population and structures come from Census ACS 5-Year 2022 tracts, sampled across each zone, the same sampling live events use. A dense city and an empty desert therefore give very different answers. If the Census could not be sampled for a zone, that zone shows a dash and no total is given. A dash is not a zero. Critical facilities (hospitals, fire stations, schools) are counted within a stated radius of the center, up to 200 km.

No dollar loss is shown. Modeled loss on Calchis is hurricane-only and comes from the stochastic event set, not from a scenario’s circles.

Rehearse it

Start a tabletop from this scenario creates a tabletop exercise with the briefing as its starting situation and opens it, ready for injects and participants. See Planning and recording an exercise. Exercises are part of the Agency plan.

Availability

Scenario planning is included from Analyst — see pricing.