The Asia and Oceania regions are frequently affected by severe natural phenomena such as tropical cyclones, torrential monsoons, volcanic eruptions, yellow sandstorms, floods, sea ice, and wildfires. The importance of monitoring the climate and the environment is also increasing, which has prompted enhanced global interest in the field.
The government of Niger, in partnership with the World Bank and a team of local volunteers, steps up the gathering of data on Niamey’s exposure to floods using drone and open source data to support disaster preparedness.
The initiative started with a team of volunteers, students and young professionals who used an open source mobile application to build a database on exposed people and assets in Niamey, the capital city.
The team has so far gathered about 15,000 data point on household and infrastructure in the region. Drone African Service, a Nigerien startup has been providing training on the use of drones to acquire high-resolution images of exposed people and facilities. This is further analyzed and modelled for flood risk of the most vulnerable communities, which will be further shared with Nigerien government authorities on the risk data portal.
Drone Africa Services trained the team on digital cartography using OpenStreetMaps and a mobile...
read moreThe identification of critical glacial lakes is based on remote sensing method in which several criteria related to glacial lakes, glaciers and physical condition of surrounding area is considered to assess potential for future outburst and possible glacial lake outburst flood (GLOF).
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