To support the National Office of Civil Protection (ONPC) of Tunisia and other government agencies in using space-based information for disaster management, UN-SPIDER conducted a three-day training in Tunis from 9 to 11 March. The course highlighted the relevance and usefulness of remote sensing and satellite data as a decision-making tool in risk and disaster management. It focused on the UN-SPIDER Recommended Practice for flood mapping with Sentinel-1 radar data to support authorities in responding to recurring floods in the country.
Twelve participants attended the event, which introduced them to remote sensing and provided an overview of synthetic-aperture radar (SAR) principles, before walking them step-by-step through downloading, processing and mapping data from the Sentinel-1 satellite using the free and open source software solutions SNAP and QGIS. The training also…
read moreWhen analysing wildfires and their impacts, remote sensing instruments provide frequent, broad coverage at minimal incremental cost and at no risk, compared with traditional in situ monitoring. Over the past 20 years, the research community has developed tools and techniques to capture key aspects of fire behavior and impacts, with data from spaceborne instruments such as the Multiangle Imaging Spectroradiometer (MISR).
The NASA Disasters Program, in cooperation with the Active Aerosol Plume-height (AAP) project, has developed the first-ever interactive 3D map of MISR fire plume-height data, which demonstrates the height of smoke plumes emanating from the Australian fires. The 3D data was captured by NASA’s Terra satellite which flew over the eastern coast of Australia on 16 December 2019. The map shows that in…
read moreThe training date is in the past. However, videos and resources of the training can be accessed here.
This webinar will focus on a NASA instrument that was launched and installed on the International Space Station in summer 2018. Designed to study terrestrial ecosystems and plant water stress from the ISS, ECOSTRESS can also be used to better understand crop health, volcanoes, urban heat, wildland fires, coastal systems, and much more.
The primary science and applications mission of ECOSTRESS is to address three critical questions around vegetation health and agriculture:
Major disasters such as droughts and wildfires are driven by the dryness of vegetation. To enhance the monitoring of plant water stress, NASA launched and installed a new sensor on the International Space Station. ECOSTRESS (ECOsystem Spaceborne Thermal Radiometer Experiment on Space Station) allows identifying loss of water in leaves- even before they show visible signs of trouble.
The image to the left shows a product derived from ECOSTRESS data, indicating that the forest fires during the 2019 Amazon dry season were concentrated in water-stressed areas, which are not visible on optical imagery. “To the naked eye, the fires appear randomly distributed throughout the forest,…
read moreSatellite technology became an integral part of efforts to detect and contain forest fires in Mecklenburg Western Pomerania, Germany at the end of June and early July. The German Aerospace Center (DLR) used satellite information, along with images captured by the Modular Aerial Camera System (MACS), to create maps, which provided emergency services with up-to-date information about areas affected by the fires.
When tracking the fires near Lübtheen, for example, the DLR Center for Satellite-Based Crisis Information (ZKI) used a freely available Sentinel-2 image, in which false-colour data offered valuable information about the status of the fires. Additionally, ZKI made use of data acquired by the Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) and the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) to determine the locations of the fires.…
read moreIn the past year, “there were 315 natural disaster events recorded with 11,804 deaths, over 68 million people affected, and US$131.7 billion in economic losses around the world.” This is according to the Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters (CRED) in its recently released 2018 Natural Disasters Report.
While these 2018 natural disaster values represent a decrease when compared with the annual averages from 2008 to 2017, some geographic areas still experienced great losses of life and damages due to natural hazards. Indonesia was most adversely impacted in terms of lives claimed, with earthquakes in August and September 2018 that left a total of 4,904 people dead or missing, according to the CRED. Earthquakes also accounted for the greatest number of deaths among natural disasters worldwide in 2018. And among all types of natural hazards, floods affected the greatest number of people during the…
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