Intensive capacity development sessions for Pacific island countries (Cook Islands, Fiji, Kiribati, Micronesia (the Federated States of), Samoa, Solomon Islands, Tonga, and Vanuatu).
The project aims to enhance institutional and technical capacity for using geospatial data and technology applications and promote regional cooperation for sharing geospatial data for disaster management in Pacific island countries.
Developed for the needs of the ASEAN sub-region in Asia and the Pacific, the handbooks can also be adapted for use in other regions.
The handbooks have been developed through expert working groups, in collaboration with United Nations partners including UNOOSA/UN-SPIDER, UNITAR-UNOSAT, and OCHA. As well as extensive consultation with space agencies, national disaster management authorities and regional institutions, including GISTDA, LAPAN, ASEAN Coordinating Centre for Humanitarian Assistance on Disaster Management and Asian Institute of Technology.
For a comprehensive and objective analysis of the settlement patterns, the DLR additionally developed an approach to display the spatial networks between the mapped settlements. It enables the computation of various form and centrality measures to characterize settlement patterns, at different spatial units, ranging from global to local scale.
CEMS is a core service of the European Union’s Earth Observation programme Copernicus. It supports all phases of the disaster management cycle by delivering warnings and risk assessments of floods and forest fires and by providing geospatial information derived from satellite images on the impact of natural and man-made disasters all over the world (before, during or after a crisis). The two Mapping services of CEMS (Rapid Mapping, Risk and Recovery Mapping) are delivering products since April 2012. The Risk & Recovery Mapping provided for example information for preparedness, disaster risk assessment and risk reduction related to earthquakes in Nepal, several post-disaster assessments for flood and fire events, reconstruction and recovery monitoring in Haiti, and multi-risk assessments for the Azores Islands in Portugal.
CEMS is coordinated by the European Commission (joint coordination between the Directorate Generals ECHO, JRC, GROW). Activation requests…
read moreOn 11 July 2018, the first data on air quality by Copernicus Sentinel-5P was released. Presenting a great improvement in accuracy for monitoring air pollutants, these maps show the presence of trace gases such as ozone, nitrogen dioxide and carbon monoxide. Additional data products such as the Aerosol index can provide information on atmospheric volcanic ash for aviation safety and on high levels of UV radiation.
Sentinel-5 Precursor was created to reduce the data gap between Envisat and Sentinel-5, which is set to be launched ~2021. Sentinel-5P is part of the constellation of SENTINEL-4, -5 and -5 precursor (S4, S5, S5P), developed by the European Space Agency, to gather information on atmospheric variables to support European policies.
High expectations are set on Sentinel 5P, as it carries the Tropomi instrument - the most advanced…
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