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 International Charter “Space and Major Disasters” has been activated on 18 September after Typhoon Manghut hit the northern coast of Luzon in the Philippines with winds of up to 180mph. This has made Manghut one of the strongest storms in decades.
The high winds also churned rough seas as it moved across Luzon, producing 30 feet-high waves, damaging forest, dragging electricity supplies and harming a farmland in Cagayan.
Mass evacuations, restricted travel and school closures have helped to manage the situation across the Philippines, with the army on standby to assist relief efforts.
On 16 September, Manghut was making its way to southeastern China after moving all across the Phillippines.
read moreIn order to encourage the targeted retrieval of space-based information and data by disaster risk reduction practitioners, content on the Portal is systematically enriched with metadata. For instance, data sources are marked up with data about their file type, satellite/sensor and spatial coverage and whether they relate to the disaster risk management or emergency response phase. The tool features a range of filters that draw on the metadata, thereby allowing users to narrow down their search, for example, filtering available GIS software by hazard type. This ensures that users efficiently find the content that is most relevant to them. At the same time, the Portal encourages the discovery of resources related to those accessed by the user, by providing links to them on the same page. This allows for contextualisation and highlights links between resources...
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