Iran (Islamic Republic of)

Space-based applications related to Earth Observation and geospatial data play an important role in supporting disaster risk reduction, response and recovery efforts through providing accurate and timely information for decision-makers. Monitoring floods, drought conditions and water resource environments using satellite remote sensing (RS) technologies have become more essential recently, in particular for developing countries.

The workshop will be held in Tehran, Iran, from 9 to 11 August 2021, in a virtual format, and will be hosted by the Iranian Space Agency (ISA). The workshop will explore how current space technologies help identify and monitor the effects of a changing climate – including the onset of drought, flash floods, and general water resources conditions as a result of global climate change, in particular on an international and regional scale. The discussions at the workshop will also be linked to the 2030 Agenda for...

The United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs (UNOOSA), as part of the support it provides to Member States through its UN-SPIDER programme, has requested the activation of the International Charter "Space and Major Disasters" for monitoring the impact of the floods in the Islamic Republic of Iran caused by heavy rainfall in the southwestern provinces of Golestan and Mazandaran on 31 March. The Charter was activated on behalf of UN-SPIDER Regional Support Office the Iranian Space Agency (ISA), which is acting as project manager for the activation.

A state of emergency has been declared by officials with at least 45 people killed and many more injured as flash flood water and mud damaged thousands of buildings and  more rainfall is expected in the coming days. Up to 56 villages near the Dez and Karkheh rivers may need to be evacuated as water needs to be released from two dams.Officials reported that in the next five days around three billion cubic...

According to the Russian Federal Space Agency, Roscosmos, two Russian space companies signed a pre-contractual agreement with the Iranian Bonyan Danesh Shargh in order to assist the Islamic Republic of Iran to build its own satellite observation system. The aim of the remote sensing system is to monitor the Earth’s atmosphere and oceans.

The Russian NPK BARL will be in charge of constructing and adapting the system’s ground infrastructure and VNIIEM Corporation, the other Russian partner, is expected to build and launch the satellites. For its part, Bonyan Danesh Shargh will be responsible of operating the system when it is completed.

Leonid Makridenko, CEO of VNIIEM, stated that “The pre-contractual arrangement covers the development of an earth remote-sensing system based on an upgraded version of the Kanopus-V1 (Canopus-B) observation satellite.”

On occasion of the World Space Week, the Deputy Head of the Iranian Space Agency (ISA) Hamid Fazeli issued a statement about the launch of three remote sensing satellites. 

On 4 October, the Deputy Head of ISA gave notice that these three new satellites will be sent into space to conduct monitoring, remote sensing and topography enterprises. Also, he communicated that the acquisition of complete knowledge of geosynchronous and remote-sensing technologies remains among ISA's priorities. 

The satellites Zafar and Tolou will orbit around 36,000 and 500 kilometers above the equator, respectively. They will be equipped with colour cameras and will gather data to observe the Earth's surface and detect natural disasters. The...

Valerie Amos, Under-Secretary-General and Emergency Relief Coordinator, in an interview with the Iranian Islamic Republic News Agency IRNA underscored the importance of sharing critical information on disasters. She stated that the UN favors cooperation with Iran in sharing information on crisis management as the country ranks sixth worldwide in term of being prone to natural disasters, as IRNA reported. She said that there were lot of experience available to Iran that are important to share.

IRNA elaborated: "Amos referred to her last yearˈs visit to Iran during which an agreement was signed with Iran for cooperation in disaster management and said there has been progress in implementation of the Memorandum of Understanding.

She said last year quakes were simulated and all people involved in responding to the disaster, including...

UN-SPIDER's network of Regional Support Offices is currently developing Recommended Practices on the use of space-based information for disaster risk management and emergency response. The practices deal with a variety of topics such as droughts, floods, agricultural monitoring or land degradation and include detailed information on the data and methodologies used as well as step-by-step instructions.

Six practices have already been submitted by Regional Support Office with others to follow. These practices will be discussed at the upcoming 5th UN-SPIDER RSO-Meeting on 13 and 14 February 2014 in Vienna, Austria, and will be disseminated through the UN-SPIDER Knowledge Portal once final.

Flood Mapping: This practice is devoted to the use of SAR satellite imagery for flood mapping. The practice shows the use of ESA NEST software for pre-processing and processing of SAR imagery using a threshold method for deriving the flood extent. QuantumGIS is used...

On 17 October 2013, UNOOSA's Director, Mazlan Othman, visited UN-SPIDER's Regional Support Office (RSO) in the Islamic Republic of Iran, hosted by the Iran Space Agency (ISA). In the Alborz Space Centre, the experts presented UN-SPIDER RSO activities and services. Other topics discussed included dust storm monitoring in the Middle East, mapping of incoming solar radiation, drought monitoring and forecasting, the National Remote Sensing Laboratory and ISA's Spectral Library Database.

The RSO experts also took the opportunity to present their Geo-Portal and E-Learning system. The E-Learning system is operational both in English and Farsi languages. A draft version of the first English training course entitled "Introduction to Disaster Management" will be uploaded to the E-Learning system soon. Additional modules for the E-Learning system especially in the field of Disaster Management and Disaster Risk Reduction using space technology are currently being...

The UN-SPIDER Regional Support Offices in Iran (ISA) and Pakistan (SUPARCO) through Inter-Islamic Network on Space Sciences and Technology (ISNET) jointly held a two week Workshop on Space Applications for Disaster Risk Reduction and Management during 7-19 September 2013 at Iranian Space Agency (ISA) in Tehran, Iran. The workshop was attended by 28 scientists and researchers from ISNET member states who work in matters related to applications of space technology for disaster risk reduction and management particularly on early warning, prevention, response and mitigation. The participants represented space agencies, disaster management authorities and other space-related organizations from Iran, Pakistan, Iraq, Bangladesh, Senegal, Libya, Malaysia and Sudan.

The workshop was aimed at imparting hands-on training on six major disaster hazards, namely: floods, earthquakes, landslides, cyclones, tsunamis and avalanches. The main objectives of the workshop included:

• To...

During the new Iranian calendar year which started on March 21, the Islamic Republic of Iran plans to launch seven satellites into space, Hamid Fezeli, Head of the Iran Space Agency (ISA) said. ISA is also host of one of UN-SPIDER's Regional Support Offices.

The Nahid, a satellite which is designed by experts at the research centre of ISA with the cooperation of the scientists from Amirkabir University of Technology, is one of the satellites that is scheduled to be launched among the seven.

Other satellites that are scheduled for launching are the Fajr (Dawn), the Zafar (Triumph), and Mesbah. Fajr will be used to facilitate activities related to agriculture, conservation of natural resources and forests, management of natural disasters and other data collection purposes, the ISA chief said.

UN-SPIDER's Regional Support Office (RSO) in Iran, hosted by the Iranian Space Agency (ISA), celebrated World Space Week 2012 (4-10 October) in Iran with several events. The RSO organized a one day conference on the topic "Using space technology for health and security" during which the keynote speakers presented several speeches on tele-medicine and food security. Another one day conference dealt with "SAR technology and applications". ISA furthermore held the opening ceremony for the "National GeoPortal and Data Center" and facilitated several radio and TV programs to showcase the application of space technology. Exhibitions additionally presented space technologies and astronomy in several cities.

The World Space Week is the largest annual space event in the world. The General Assembly proclaimed World Space Week in 1999, to celebrate the contributions of space science and technology to the betterment of the human condition.

UN-SPIDER's Regional Support Office located in Japan, ADRC (Asian Disaster Reduction Centre), is in the process of producing the booklet "Considerations for effective use of space-based information to assess Tsunami impacts - Lessons learned from the recent Tsunami in Japan". This publication is realized in cooperation with the Japanese Space Agency (JAXA). The booklet will be of great value for other nations' disaster preparedness efforts by providing lessons learnt on the Great East Japan Earthquake and the subsequent tsunami. The publication will be presented at the occasion of the 5th Asian Ministerial Conference on Disaster Risk Reduction scheduled to take place on 22-25 October 2012 in Yogakarta, Indonesia. The booklet will also be offered for download on the UN-SPIDER Knowledge Portal.

This initiative is an outcome of the UN-SPIDER Regional Support Office (RSO) meeting in February 2012 in Vienna, Austria, where RSOs agreed to contribute to UN-SPIDER...

UNOOSA/UN-SPIDER has activated the International Charter: Space and Major Disaster to provide satellite imagery for the two strong earthquakes that occurred in Iran on 11 August 2012. This international mechanism was activated on behalf of the Iranian Space Agency, host of UN-SPIDER's Regional Support Office in Iran. The German Aerospace Center (DLR) is the project manager for this activation.

The two strong earthquakes in north-west Iran had been followed by multiple aftershocks. 300 people were killed, more than 3000 victims had been injured and 16,000 people were left homeless. The quakes measured on Richter scales of 6.4 and 6.3, damaging rural villages in Ahar, Varzgahan and Harees, in the city of Tabriz. Some 20 villages in mountainous areas had been completely destroyed whilst hundreds had been damaged.

Search and rescue operations came to a close on Sunday, 12 August, since most residents had been accounted for. Officials confirm that residents of affected...

On August 11, 2012 two strong earthquakes shook Iran. The NASA Earth Observatory image shows earthquake locations, magnitudes and faults that are superimposed on a digital elevation map, made from the ASTER Global Digital Elevation Model Version 2 (GDEM2) using earthquake and plate tectonics data from the USGS Earthquake Hazard Program.

The two earthquakes were separated only by 11 minutes and 10 kilometers. The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) explained that they occurred in the crust of the Eurasian Plate. In this region, the Arabian Plate moves around 26 millimeters per year northward with respect to the Eurasian Plate, but USGS stated that these earthquakes happened about 300 kilometers east of the plate boundary. Probably the events occurred due to an oblique strike-slip fault, where blocks of Earth slide past each other, but because of the location was so far from a plate boundary it is difficult to give accurate explanation.

On Saturday 11th August, two earthquakes measuring 6.4 and 6.3 on the moment magnitude scale rumbled through the highly populated region of Azarbayjan-e Khavari in Iran, 53km from Tabriz.The earthquakes and killed 306 people and injured 3,037, according to Health Minister Marzieh Vahid Dastjerdi. He also said that "we are continuing the search for bodies", so an increase on the death number is not discarded. More than 16,000 people have lost their houses, they are having temporary shelter in 3,000 tents and thousands of blankets, food and water have been distributed.

The Iranian Space Agency, in its role as a UN-SPIDER’s RSO, represented the UN-SPIDER Programme in the "APSCO Training Course on Environment and Disaster Monitoring through Space Technology” which took place in Dhaka, Bangladesh, from 22 November to 1 December 2011. ISRA staff gave lectures on the topics of Image processing methods and tools for disaster and environmental monitoring, including Geometric correction, GPS-based GCP collection, geo-referencing, digital mosaicking etc.

In October, the Iranian Parliament (Majlis) ratified a bill allowing the government to enhance its efforts to design and launch satellites and satellite carriers. Three years after Russia launched Iran's first satellite in 2005, another satellite --jointly designed by Iran, China, and Thailand -- was launched into orbit by China. Iranian officials say Islamic countries could use satellite imagery for hazard and natural disaster management as well as accurate cartography.
More information, please see: Press TV

Official clarification from the National Space Agency of Malaysia:

"With reference to that news/article, ANGKASA herewith intends to clarify that there has been no discussion held between ANGKASA Malaysia and Iran on Malaysia participating...

The 7th INDM conference will bring together Iranian and international experts in risk and disaster management in Tehran, Iran in February 2016. The conference will cover a broad range of topics - in line with the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction 2015-2030 - from the need for an improved understanding of disaster risk in all its dimensions of exposure, vulnerability and hazard characteristics, to the strengthening of disaster risk governance, avoidance of creation of new risks, climate change adaptation, GEO-information, disaster medicine, and socio-economic vulnerability.

Among the objectives of the conference are: strengthening disaster risk governance to manage disaster risk; investing in disaster risk reduction for resilience; and enhancing disaster...

Introduction

Space-based applications related to Earth Observation and geospatial data play an important role in supporting disaster risk reduction, response, and recovery efforts through providing accurate and timely information for decision-makers. Monitoring floods, drought conditions and water resource environments using satellite remote sensing (RS) technologies have become more essential recently in particular for developing countries.

This workshop will address the use of space technologies (remote sensing, telecommunication and global navigation satellite systems) for various applications in natural disaster managements that can provide sustainable social and economic benefits. Current and planned projects/research that use space-based technologies for both practical applications and scientific explorations will be presented. Cooperative efforts and international partnerships for capacity-building, training and research will be discussed....