Seminar on Remote Sensing, Satellite Imagery and Humanitarian Crises
Short notice, but the Humanitarian Futures Programme will be hosting a seminar on Wednesday 25 June at King’s College, London. Focus is on satellite imagery and its future uses by the humanitarian community in monitoring natural hazards, climate change and health. If you’re around London, it should be interesting - plus, free lunch! Come on, everybody likes a free lunch, especially in London.
Speaker:Professor Bhupendra Jasani, King’s College London
Wednesday, 25 June 2008
Time: 12.30-14.00
Venue: King’s College, London, main Strand Campus
Cost: Free, Lunch provided
![[del.icio.us]](http://images.del.icio.us/static/img/delicious.small.gif){kind=small}
Paul,
A little too short of notice to try to arrange a US Government funded trip to go to a 2 hour seminar in London..but once again, at least you keep us informed before it occurs…didn’t hear about it otherwise.
In response to the Sichuan earthquake and an official request from the Chinese government, the US Department of State’s Humanitarian Information Unit provided both declassified US Government “spy” satellite imagery and licensed-commercial imagery to the Chinese government, and we also sent it to UNOSAT (Einar) and OCHA (Lorant) and to IFRC.
The useful images included remote earthquake/landslide created lakes, river diversions, submerged towns; damaged bridges, roadways, man-made dams, power stations; and collapsed buildings. Our analysts also provided annotated analysis and damage assessments on or with the images and a modeling simulation forecasting the impact of the breach of one of the earthquake-damaged dams, which fortunately did not occur. In addition to the sanitized and declassified static images, we provided imagery derived graphic products and geo-referenced data files of damaged location points to the Chinese government. Between May 15 and June 15, the State Department provided 27 sanitized/declassified satellite images, 16 imagery derived analytical graphic products, six datasets of imagery-derived damaged location points, and five commercial-licensed images from private vendors.
I hope that in the not too distant future, the images and products will be completely declassified and made available to a wider audience, but at least we got it in the hands of responders who used it. We did get letters of thank you from the Chinese Government.
Dennis King
Analyst
Humanitarian Information Unit
US Department of State
Washington DC
Dennis King
20 Jun 08 at 19:44
Dennis - good work on the satellite imagery, did you get any feedback on how exactly was used? Sahana is being used by the regional government in Chengdu (apparently) via IBM, and we are waiting to see the code returns to understand exactly how they were using it.
Paul Currion
21 Jun 08 at 9:37