This summer, Houston is hosting seven World Cup matches over 21 days, right in the heart of a severe weather season. A few hundred miles north, Dallas Fort Worth International Airport is absorbing waves of international travelers visiting for the same reason through a facility roughly the size of Manhattan. Neither is leaving that scale of complexity to chance. Behind the scenes, two geospatial platforms, Houston’s Atlas and DFW’s AWARE system, are turning scattered and siloed data into something operators can act on in real time.
We spoke with Anthony Powell, Assistant Director of Houston Public Works IT, and Francesco Carmine, GIS Analyst for Houston’s Office of Emergency Management, along with Adan Banda, Senior Geospatial Data Manager at DFW Airport, about how these systems came together and what they’re revealing under pressure. DFW’s geospatial work is no stranger to Geo Week audiences either, having been the subject of a keynote at the event a few years ago.
Two Systems, One Origin Story
Both platforms came from the same realization: the data these organizations needed already existed; it just wasn’t talking to itself. Houston had vehicle tracking, road closure workflows, and police location data all flowing independently. DFW had real-time sensors scattered across a large campus. In both cases, nothing was fundamentally missing; they just didn’t live anywhere near each other.
For Houston, the fix took shape gradually, over about ten months of deliberate groundwork. “The approach that we took was initially out of the gate not to really focus on the end solution and the interface,” Powell said, “but more on the data and identifying those key data elements that were going to be vital.”
For DFW, the fix was born from crisis. On Thanksgiving 2024, gridlock backed up from the airport’s toll plazas all the way to the terminals, so badly that travelers abandoned their cars on International Parkway and walked the rest of the way to their gates. “It was bad,” Banda said. “We just saw the vulnerabilities immediately. ” That day became the catalyst for AWARE.
Once each team had the underlying data sorted, they turned to design. Houston brought in vendor Dympatic with a simple brief: build something more than a dashboard. DFW leaned on ArcGIS to make its data geographic rather than just statistical, overlaying real-time inputs onto road networks, dispatch zones, and fire districts so raw sensor feeds became an actionable map rather than a repository of numbers.
Predicting the Crowd Before It Arrives
Where the two platforms diverge is in what they’re predicting. DFW’s AWARE system is built around anticipating passenger surges. By combining FlightAware data with toll plaza counts, camera feeds, and curbside lidar sensors, the airport can forecast that Terminal C will spike at 4 p.m. on a given Thursday because ten American Airlines flights are landing around then and proactively route transportation staff and DPS before congestion sets in. The stakes are explicitly financial: toll and parking revenue is close to pure profit for the airport, and during the 2024 Thanksgiving incident, DFW had to lift its toll arms and let cars through free, costing tens of thousands of dollars for every five minutes the gates stayed open.
Houston’s Atlas, meanwhile, is built to run two crises simultaneously. During a tropical storm threat that coincided with a match and Fan Fest, the team split attention across two command posts, with one tracking World Cup activity and the other watching the storm’s citywide impact, so each could see which resources weren’t already committed elsewhere. During the Netherlands-Sweden match, Atlas let operators monitor two fan marches (roughly 20,000 Dutch supporters and 5,000 to 6,000 Swedish fans) alongside the stadium and Fan Fest, all from different screens, by pinning the locations of officers along each route.
Both systems also lean on AI to add nuance human operators might miss at a glance. Houston’s threat-analysis widget learned to differentiate heat risk by location, recognizing that the stadium’s parking lots create a heat island effect well above the citywide baseline, though Carmine was careful to note a meteorologist stays on-site to catch what the model doesn’t. DFW’s equivalent is really human judgment applied to timing: knowing that World Cup travelers, unlike Thanksgiving or spring break crowds, arrive staggered across days rather than all at once, which is largely why the airport hasn’t seen major disruptions during the tournament.
Moving VIPs and Bridging Agencies
Both cities also had to solve a quieter logistics problem: moving high-profile people without drawing attention. At DFW, VIP passengers, including players, skip the standard concourse entirely, disembarking directly onto the airfield and traveling a known, mapped route straight to International Parkway, with DPS and airport staff notified of exact entry and exit points in advance. In Houston, GIS plays a related but different role, helping integrate a fire department that had comparatively limited GIS tooling. When the department brought in an outside EMS vendor for the World Cup, Houston fed that vendor’s ambulance tracking directly into Atlas, so fire crews could see their assets and partner ambulances together in real time, closing a longstanding visibility gap between Houston’s more GIS-mature and less GIS-mature agencies.
What’s Still Ahead
Neither team considers the job finished. Houston has already built the groundwork for a future public-facing version of Atlas, one that could eventually share flood sensor data and low-water crossing alerts, though sensitivity concerns keep the platform internal for now. DFW’s roadmap points toward deeper integration of camera and lidar feeds through ArcGIS Velocity, along with better geospatial communication around construction zones after some congestion during the tournament.
Despite operating in very different environments, both teams arrived at the same underlying insight: the hard part was never finding the data. It was connecting it, mapping it geographically, and getting it to the right person fast enough to act. For Houston and DFW alike, the World Cup isn’t just a stress test of infrastructure; it’s proof that real-time geospatial data works best not as a record of what happened but as a tool for seeing what’s about to.
