Disaster monitoring and risk assessment within the UN-SPIDER Regional Support Office (RSO) in Ukraine

In February 2010, United Nations Office of Outer space Affairs (UNOOSA) and Space Research Institute NAS Ukraine and SSA Ukraine signed an agreement on the establishment of the UN-SPIDER Regional Support Office (RSO) in Ukraine. The activities of the RSO include outreach and capacity building, horizontal cooperation, technical advisory support at national, regional and international levels.

The presentation will provide an outlook on recent activities of the UN-SPIDER RSO in Ukraine by highlighting benefits of using Earth observation data from space to disaster management. A particular emphasis will be made on international cooperation. Concrete examples will be given: Namibia SensorWeb Pilot Project [1] and providing added-value products to the International Charter “Space and Major Disasters” [2] and local governments and authorities. The Namibian pilot is a testbed for evaluating and prototyping key technologies for rapid acquisition and distribution of data products generated from heterogeneous sources for decision support systems to monitor floods. Ukrainian RSO contribution includes rapid flood mapping from satellite SAR imagery and flood risk assessment and quantification using a time-series of satellite data. Collaboration with the Charter involves added value products on rapid flood mapping and delivering data from Ukrainian remote sensing satellite Sich-2 (in particular, for the past activation for floods in Cameroon). Other real-world examples of using satellite data to disaster monitoring will be presented highlighting both advantages and challenges. Current satellite capabilities and technological advances (such as Sensor Web) on operational mapping of disasters with focus on floods will be given.

References.
[1] Kussul, N., Mandl, D., Moe, K., Mund, J.-P., Post, J., Shelestov, A., Skakun, S., Szarzynski, J., Van Langenhove, G., and Handy, M., 2012. Interoperable Infrastructure for Flood Monitoring: SensorWeb, Grid and Cloud // IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Applied Earth Observations and Remote Sensing, 5(6), 1740–1745.
[2] Kussul, N., Shelestov, A., Skakun, S., Li, G., and Kussul, O., 2012. The Wide Area Grid Testbed for Flood Monitoring Using Earth Observation Data // IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Applied Earth Observations and Remote Sensing, 5(6), 1746–1751.