Want to know what’s going on in the environment near your home? Your child’s school? Need data for a proposed project? Would you like to access the environmental information you need from a single resource? The Rapid Access INformation System (RAINS) currently being developed by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in Seattle, Wash., has enormous potential to meet the strong demand for such a system from the public, industry, and government agencies. RAINS provides an on-line workspace that allows users to process, compare, analyze, map, share, and visualize a wide variety of environmental, programmatic, and management data from multiple sources. The system is being designed such that it can be readily modified making it applicable to a wide variety of specific uses.

The Environmental Technology Commercialization Center (ETC²), established in 1998 through a cooperative agreement between Battelle Memorial Institute and the Federal Technology Transfer Office of the U.S. EPA, makes EPA-developed technologies and expertise available to the private sector. ETC² has been helping to facilitate the development and use of RAINS by business and government agencies.

Currently, most environmental data users face an array of challenges as they attempt to use disparate data sets from a variety of legacy systems. Environmental policy and program specialists typically require assistance from database and GIS experts to extract and map data—often a time-consuming and expensive process. Furthermore, environmental data for many programs are often collected by different organizations and require analysis of data collected from a variety of cross-political jurisdictions, such as watersheds that cover multiple states or countries.

Recent information technology advances offer an opportunity to integrate and provide rapid access to data from many sources, thereby making it possible to by-pass jurisdictional and organizational obstacles that hamper efforts to assemble data to guide environmental decision making. Several years ago, under the leadership of Jon Schweiss, the GIS group of the EPA Region 10 transformed the way they approach their work. Rather than focusing on providing customized GIS services for various EPA programs, they began to build on-line tools to help individual policy and program specialists access the data and mapping they needed with nothing more than a browser. These tools have been integrated into the RAINS platform for use in visualization, analyses, outreach, educational, and decision-support efforts.

As word spread about RAINS’s real and potential utility, agencies and environmental programs inquired about the system. To date, over 20 agencies have expressed interest in having their own RAINS-like system. ETC² has worked closely with Mr. Schweiss and his group to bring in strategic partners who can provide the technical assistance needed to develop RAINS into a platform that can be readily deployed for other agencies, programs, and businesses, and then networked together to further facilitate data sharing. ETC² has successfully brought a consortium of potential commercial partners to the table to discuss a Cooperative Research and Development Agreement (CRADA) that would provide benefits to those partners while providing technical and marketing assistance for RAINS.

These potential partners include organizations with exceptional strengths in GIS, database and warehousing techniques, and mode integration. They are expected to help improve scalability, performance, and ease of deployment, and to provide customization services for eventual clients. Work is currently underway with existing prospects for RAINS to ensure that the platform addresses their specific needs. Once marketing requirements are further defined, some private sector partners are expected to enter into CRADAs with the EPA to advance the technology of the RAINS platform. In addition, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL)—a Battelle-operated Department of Energy national laboratory—is working with the EPA to host RAINS on a public server to demonstrate the system’s capabilities to potential partners and users.

An important milestone was reached when the U.S. Forest Service and EPA Region 10 jointly funded PNNL to develop a RAINS-based system to provide regulators and the public with information on agricultural and forest burning. The new publicly accessible, on-line system, called BlueSkyRAINS, will provide information on potential burn operations, meteorological conditions (including forecasts), smoke trajectories, air quality impacts, and other relevant environmental data related to agriculture and forest burning activities. A prototype is due out in the early spring, just in time for the 2002 burning season.

For more information on this project, contact Kathleen Judd at (206) 528-3330, juddk@battelle.org, or Ann Lesperance at (206) 528-3223, lesperan@battelle.org.