Dear readers,
We're glad to share with you the July 2020 UN-SPIDER Monthly Updates, and would like to make you aware of a recent addition to our Recommended Practice on drought monitoring using the Standard Vegetation Index (SVI). Besides versions in R and Python, this step-by-step procedure for accessing, processing and visualizing space-based information for drought monitoring is now also available as a Google Earth Engine script. A detailed explanation of the script and a video tutorial can be accessed on the UN-SPIDER Knowledge Portal.
Enjoy the read!
UN-SPIDER at a glance
27/07/2020On 22 July 2020, UN-SPIDER and the Central American Coordination Centre for Natural Disaster Prevention (CEPREDENAC) joined forces to conduct a webinar on the use of novel space-based products and services to monitor forest fires that took place during the spring of 2020 in Honduras. The webinar included high ranking authorities and participants from several institutions of Honduras such as… Read more
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News from the community
31/07/2020A new project of the European Space Agency (ESA) aims to combine data from two different Copernicus Sentinel missions to provide estimates of evapotranspiration at the scale of a single field. The European Space Agency’s Sentinels for Evapotranspiration (Sen-ET) project brings together optical data from the Sentinel-2 mission and thermal data from… Read more
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29/07/2020A grantmaking collective committed to creating and mobilizing labeled datasets that facilitate the development of machine learning applications to address urgent problems has launched a new request for proposals (RFP) for funding. [Lacuna Fund](https://lacunafund.org/), which aims to support as many organizations as possible in using artificial intelligence for social good in low- and middle-… Read moreCountry/Region mentioned:
23/07/2020The United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (ESCAP) has published a policy study concerning the impending climate risk scenarios in South Asia and their intersection with the COVID-19 pandemic. The aim of this report is to facilitate policy actions that could protect communities at risk as well as to lay the foundations of resilient recovery of the most… Read more
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21/07/2020In the latest example of anticipatory humanitarian action, the United Nations released $5.2 million from the Central Emergency Response Fund (CERF) to help communities in Bangladesh prepare themselves ahead of major monsoon floods. The allocation of funds to agencies in the country to prepare to deliver support was triggered by a forecast from the Global Flood Awareness System (GloFAS), which… Read moreCountry/Region mentioned:
06/07/2020The European Space Agency (ESA) has released a call for mission ideas to develop a new satellite mission that advances the scientific understanding of Earth and shows how new technologies can be used in space. The mission’s goal is to… Read more
