Crisis Management
Earth observation data has a great potential in this domain. Whether it is data supply into crisis management support systems, critical infrastructure monitoring support, flood monitoring and damage assessment or humanitarian response support, remote sensing technology adoption can really help to save human properties and what is the most important – the lives.
Crisis Management Systems Support
Web-based software tools are used more and more to enhance the capabilities of crisis planners and crisis managers in both private and governamental organizations in the general security area, as well as environmental protection, utilities management, airports and seaports, healthcare, transports, roads, energy plants, borders control, etc.
These systems allow not only taking advantage of distributed services for management support, but enable also to utilize various information sources in distributed manner for better monitoring and reduction of risks and for more effective response in case of threats imposed especially to the subjects of the critical infrastructure.
The standardization and openness is the key to further grow of such systems in national and international levels to assure interoperability with other systems. Often, these systems include also a simulation part to allow designing, optimization and interpretation of varios scenarios and contribute to crisis managment staff training. The Earth observation and GIS technology has a great potential to support these developments as most of the crisis related information is spatial based. Gisat is involved in EO support activities of this domain both on research and application level.
Thematic services:
- crisis management data model creation
- web service development
- 3D simulation
- systems feeds simulation
Disaster Monitoring and Damage Assessment
Global threats as terrorism or global warming require robust and rapid monitoring capacities allowing fast subsequent damage assessment. Earth observation technology is the key for operational solution. It is also reflected in European GMES (‘Global Monitoring for Environment and Security’) initiative, where security is one of the main concerns for the implementation of Earth observation based information services at European level.
Gisat has long experience with disaster monitoring and damage assessment services, in particular for flood assessment as provided in 1997 and 2002.
Thematic services:
- automatic water detection (using radar or/and optical data)
- rapid flood extent map creation (using radar or/and optical data)
- damage forecast based on land cover affected
- insurance companies support (indemnity assessment)
- crop damage assessment
Humanitarian Response Support
The relief of human suffering resulting from natural or man made crises is a
cause that all civilised humans aspire to, whether through direct physical
action or indirectly through donation or supporting activities. There is an obvious and manifested requirement of the Humanitarian Aid for supply of better geospatial information to answer the essential “where” questions in timely delivery of humanitarian aid and there is also a clear huge potential of Earth observation and GIS technology to response to these demands. Nevertheless, specific of the community, delivering humanitarian and development aid, is its complexity, diversity and dynamics being formed by different organisations on global, European, national and NGO level. Therefore specification of the standard ‘humanitarian aid’ Earth observation based services is a chalenging task, requiring a good mutual understanding of the humanitarian community needs and EO community potentials. Gisat is actively present in such gradual supporting services development providing products both for humanitarian and development activities on national and European level.
Thematic services (on various scales):
- basic image maps
- thematic image maps
- environmental risk maps
- situation/damage assessment maps
- refugee camp maps
- natural resource mapping
- distribution analysis maps
Relevant projects
| Acronym | Name / Duration | Customer |
|---|
| GRAAL | GMES for Regions: Awareness and Access Link | |
| 2011 - 2013 | EC FP7 / SpaceTec Partners SPRL (Belgium) | |
| EOWORLD | Earth observation services for WorldBank | |
| 2011 - 2012 | European Space Agency (ESA) | |
| G-MOSAIC | GMES Support to security applications | |
| 2009 - 2012 | EC FP7 / e-Geos (Italy) | |
| SAFER | GMES Emergency response and development support | |
| 2009 - 2012 | EC FP7 / Infoterra FR SAS (France) | |
| SNOWMAP | Snow monitoring | |
| 2010 - 2011 | Czech Hydrometeorological Institute | |
| FLOREO | Demonstration of ESA Environments in support to FLOod Risk Earth Observation monitoring | |
| 2008 - 2010 | European Space Agency (ESA) / Sprinx (Czech Republic) | |
| RESPOND | GMES Emergency response and development support | |
| 2007 - 2010 | European Space Agency (ESA) / Infoterra UK (United Kingdom) | |
| MEDSI | Integration of Geographical Information Systems with DB, decision-support management and an auditory system to develop an advanced system that will be able to give support on decisions in a crisis | |
| 2004 - 2005 | FP6 EU / Telefónica (Spain) | |
| ODRA LC1760 | Retrospective land cover database of the Odra catchment (1757-1767) | |
| 2001 | Joint Research Centre (DG JRC) | |
| FLOOD2000 | RADARSAT orthophoto for mapping of floods in 2000 | |
| 2000 | Czech Ministry of Environment | |
| ODRA LC1975 | Land cover database of the Odra catchment in 1975-76 | |
| 1998 - 1999 | Joint Research Centre (DG JRC) | |
| FLOOD1997 | Mapping of flooded area during events on Morava river in 1997 | |
| 1997 | Czech Hydrometeorological Institute | |
