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This paper will outline how 15 government agencies in California worked together using GIS to plan for, develop mitigation plans and respond to the catastrophic fires in Southern California in the fall of 2003. The focus of the presentation will detail how several different agencies and the private sector created a shared GIS data base to collaborate on how to provide protection, prevention and response to a pending wildfire catastrophe. Examples of how innovative uses of GIS and mobile GIS were used to assist first responders will be highlighted.

This project resulted in creating a common vision of the problem, identification of priority problems that required shared resources and cooperative efforts. GIS was used throughout the incident to planning, support public information and provide the framework for high level briefings including the President Bush.

Actual and high-quality data and information — in the most cases spatial data or geo-information (GI) - are the foundation for decision making in disaster management especially in situations where losses are to be minimized and lives are to be saved. Data and technology suppliers are talking about the magic thing: the “user” or “end user”. But, providing innovative products hoping the user will be positive about and spend a lot of money for means more than asking “who is the user?” and “where can he be found?”.

Anyhow, those products shall support information flows and working processes, often without having the time or chance to reconsider and discard decisions. First of all, data and information products must be available and usable, i.e. they must be known and available in that form and time they are needed. Technological solutions must be application-oriented, aiming at fulfilling the user’s needs in his specific environment.

These facts are taken up by the Special Interest Group “Disaster Management” under the umbrella of the “Geodaten-Infrastruktur Brandenburg (GIB)” in one of the eastern states of Germany. In the GIB framework a network of administrative players, data and software suppliers, scientific institutions and users of geographic information is developed and cooperations and reconciliations are established to build up a local Spatial Data Infrastructure (SDI). The initiative aims at the interdisciplinary and cross-institutional availability and usability of spatial data, its opening for various working fields and the establishment of an information and communication platform for administration, industry, science and society according to GI.

In the following the potentials of GI, geographic information technology (IT) and SDI for disaster management are identified. First cognitions and results as well as implementation approaches under involvement of the “users” are presented to provide application-oriented support to the effective disaster prevention and coping.

Today, geo-information acquired by remote sensing techniques is more and more used for the management of all the phases of a crisis or disaster situation. Information is generally provided either by spaceborne or by airborne instruments. However, both technologies suffer some limitations. It is thought that a High Altitude Long Endurance (HALE) Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) can combine advantages of both approaches and reduce to the minimum the disadvantages. The Flemish Institute for Technological Research (Vito) has therefore decided to develop a system combining a HALE UAV with some state-of-the-art high resolution sensors for Earth Observation in the framework of the PEGASUS project. The present paper describes the project concept, the payload definition and some possible applications in the framework of disaster management.

Effective disaster management requires getting the right information (often geographically related) to the right place at the right time. Minimising response times to incidents is therefore critical. Ordnance Survey’s Mapping for Emergencies unit addresses this requirement through out-of-hours incident support. Additionally, a Pan-government agreement now gives a wide range of central government organisations direct access to a suite of Ordnance Survey’s products, allowing better preparedness in the planning phases of disaster management.

Recent and anticipated (often disruptive) developments in spatial databases, GPS, wireless, mobile and computing technologies have changed, and will continue to change, the way in which geographic information (GI) can be collected, maintained, analysed, integrated and delivered to the end user in disaster management and other domains. GI is increasingly part of the information mainstream. These developments have changed the role of Ordnance Survey from being the nation’s map maker to being the geographic information provider to the nation, with a substantial role in developing a geographic framework in which both geographic and related information can be efficiently integrated, exchanged and understood.

These developments prompt a number of research challenges within the domain of disaster management. Three are considered and illustrated:

CNES has been involved for four years in the so called International Charter “space and major disasters”. In this framework, both software development and research activities have been carried out, which aim at testing the usefulness of space based images for risk and disaster management, and at improving the space image based products deliverable to the end users.

Space images provide unique spatial coverage and potentially high site revisit opportunities. In case of disaster (like fire, flood, earthquak…), comparing images acquired before and after the event is the usual way to extract information about the spatial extension and the magnitude of the disaster. But to perform this comparison, two steps are necessary: coregistration of images and geo-referencing on the terrain. The typical technical problems are the following: First the images are not always geo-referenced, which means not fully superposable to a map, and even when this is the case, geo-referencing is never perfect, because orbital and attitude data are not known with a sufficient accuracy. Second, because we deal with unforeseen events, thus using in the urgency whatever image is available, we may be obliged to use and compare images from different satellite instruments, when no adequate image pair is available from a single satellite.

The paper develops the technical issues of co-registration and geo-referencing. It analyses the impact of the local DEM (Digital Elevation Model) quality. It considers both cases of similar and non similar images, like for example an optic image and a radar one.

The paper addresses the present status of CNES software for risk and disaster management, pointing out its unique features and also the still missing parts. The current research directions are also presented.

As a densely populated country in a delta the Netherlands have to be very considered about flooding risks. Up to 65% of its surface is threatened by either sea or rivers. The Dutch government has started a research project ‘Floris’ (Flood Risk and Safety in the Netherlands) to calculate the risks of about half of the 53 dike-ring areas of The Netherlands. This project has four tracks: (1) determining the probability of flooding risks of dike-rings areas; (2) the reliability of hydraulic structures; (3) the consequences of flooding and (4) coping with uncertainties.

As part of the third track, the consequences of flooding, the Ministry of Transport, Public Works and Water Management has asked the University of Twente to develop a Decision Support System for analyzing the process of preventive evacuation of people and cattle from a dike-ring area.

This Support System, named Evacuation Calculator (EC), determines the results of several kinds of traffic management in terms of evacuation progress in time and traffic load. The EC makes a distinction between four types of traffic management scenarios: (1) reference; (2) nearest exit; (3) traffic management; (4) out-flow areas. The scenarios one and two represent a situation where no traffic management or limited traffic management is present. Scenario three (traffic management) calculates an optimal traffic management (given the model assumptions). Within the fourth scenario the user has the freedom to adjust the scenarios by (re)defining out-flow areas. In this way the user has the possibility to adapt to local possibilities and restraints. The limited data need and efficient algorithms in the EC make it possible to model large-scale problems.

Targets in the EC development were twofold: (1) a safe estimate of the evacuation time and (2) to support the development of an evacuation planning. These targets are met by the development of scenarios with specific and well defined objectives. Optimization methods were developed to solve the problems and meet the objectives.

The classical framework of transport planning is used as a basis, but with extensions:

The paper will describe the structure of the EC, its objective functions and problem solving techniques. Furthermore a case study of dike-ring Flevoland is presented.

The existence of elevation errors in the Digital Elevation Models (DEMs) usually is ignored, during spatial analysis of risk assessment and disaster management problems. As a result, conclusions are extracted, decisions are taken and actions are designed and executed, while the problem is examined on a wrong point of view. This paper describes the attempt to introduce a new model, the DEEM (Digital Elevation Error Model), which incorporates elevation uncertainty and accompanies a DEM uniquely. The use of an uncertain DEM, combined with a probabilistic “soft” decision approach, eliminates the risk of taking decisions that do not imply to the real problem’s basis. Research has shown deviations existing in results, up to 20–50% for volume measurements, area measurements, definition of boundaries, visibility calculation, etc., from those of a “hard” decision approach. The absence of an integrated GIS, able to manage data uncertainty, forces for by-pass approaches of the problem but not the appropriate ones.

With the aid of the Canadian Space Agency and the Canadian geospatial industry (Ærde, HCL, Strata 360), CARTEL is working in close collaboration with the Mekong River Commission (MRC) and the Cambodian Red Cross to establish a Flood Emergency Response System in Cambodia. Earth Observation (EO) and Geomatics generally insists on spatial distribution and the accessibility of the health centres, food warehouses, flood safe areas as well as the spatial distribution of the disease according to the changing factors of the physical environment and planning and the management of public health in order to improve quality of the decision-making process. The strategy is centered on the analysis of the needs for the managers of the Mekong River Commission and of the Cambodian Red Cross. It also focuses on the questions and data relating to the follow-up in space and time of the flood events and its effects on the local communities. This study takes into account the three dimensions of security: vulnerability, preparedness, response. The methodology includes the following stages: (1) analysis of the needs of the Mekong River Basin managers such as health, transportation, safe areas, infrastructures at risk, food security; (2) design of the diagram of the emergency response system including the identification and the conception of georeference data and spatial analysis functionalities; (3) design and development of a database and metadata; (4) development of vulnerability maps by using multi-date EO imagery (RADARSAT-1, aerial photography, high resolution optical imagery) combined with the historical and topographic data.

Indubitably, information and communication technologies, amongst which geographic information systems, can help in the management of disasters. Yet, there are just one element which has to interact with the other ingredients. Hence, their presence should be well-thought in order to avoid hindering the return to a “normal” situation, or worse, enhancing the effects of the disasters. By taking a spatial information science perspective, this contribution broadens the debate from technical issues to conceptual ones. It first identifies decision-making as being a major topic of interest for both disaster management and geographic information. After defining the concepts of ‘spatial decision’, ‘disaster’, ‘risk’, ‘crisis’ and the purpose of ‘plans’, this paper puts forward a framework for considering these concepts and the decision-making processes in time. By combining, in this perspective, the different concepts, a typology of disaster situations can be established and hence corresponding technological solutions or needs can be pointed out.

R&D Center ScanEx (www.scanex.ru) is leading manufacturer of personal ground stations and terminals, i.e. antenna systems for receiving, storing and processing Earth observation images. Their unique features compared to the traditional systems for gathering information about the Earth from space are as follows: affordable price, compactness, a technology on the basis of a standard PC, ease of the operation, a unified technology of data storage, processing, and image thematic analysis. All of these leads to cheaper data, simpler data acquisition technology, and quicker access time for the widest possible range of users. A personal ground station is the unique means to enable users to receive images of the Earth from space directly at their PCs. UniScan™ ground station (in stationary and mobile modifications) by R&D Center ScanEx is flexible solution for receiving information from wide range of Earth observation satellites: Terra/Aqua, IRS-1C,1D,P6, RADARSAT-1, EROS A1 and others. R&D Center ScanEx offers the complete chain for RS data acquisition, storage and processing on the base of its own hardware and software solutions. Affordable price of ground stations makes it possible to install such equipment not only for national remote sensing Centers, but at research, education organizations. The main possibility that gives UniScan™ technology is access to RS data in real-time mode — data is ready to analysis after 15–30 minutes after data reception. This is too important for such RS data applications as disaster management (flooding, fires monitoring).

R&D Center ScanEx in cooperation with Antrix Corp. offers integrated solution for acquisition information from recently launched IRS-P6 satellite by affordable price which includes hardware, software and 1,000 minutes time for data downlink. IRS-P6 data with resolution of 5.8, 23 and 56 m and short revisit period (5, 24 and 5 days correspondingly) make this data valuable for very different RS data applications.