Maintaining Extreme Weather Awareness with OSINT
By Jake Palmer, Content Manager, Skopenow — Extreme weather has the ability to disrupt anything, including businesses, schools, government services, and personal lives. From hurricanes and blizzards to wildfires and flash floods, major weather events can grind daily life to a halt in an instant. When critical infrastructure goes down and traditional communication channels fail, maintaining situational awareness becomes extremely challenging. Open-source intelligence (OSINT) provides a powerful framework to help rescuers and first responders understand and react to these problems. By leveraging publicly available data, teams are able to keep track of these dynamic events and help protect people and assets. How Weather Disrupts Inclement conditions cause widespread disruptions in three primary ways. First, they often knock out communications infrastructure like cellular networks, internet services, and broadcast systems. Power grids are also frequently impacted, leaving individuals and organizations starved of both connectivity and electricity. This loss of traditional communication channels makes it very difficult to gather information and coordinate response efforts. Second, severe weather presents direct physical hazards to people’s safety as well as the threat of damage to property, assets, and resources in the affected areas. Dangerous conditions like heavy winds, flooding, wildfires, and more can promptly cut off...
