How Space Charter Has Responded To Major Disasters?: Lessons And Perspectives

Paper number

IAC-07-E3.2.05

Author

Dr. V.S. Hegde, Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), India

Coauthor

Mr. Soma P, ISRO Telemetry, Tracking & Command Network, India

Coauthor

Mr. Veerubhotla Bhanumurthy, National Remote Sensing Agency, India

Coauthor

Mr. Srivastava N.K., ISRO Telemetry, Tracking & Command Network, India

Year

2007

Abstract

International Charter, since its inception, has captured several disasters that caused lives and livelihoods. Charter, in its mandated role, has been making efforts to strengthen the hands and minds of civil defense agencies on the ground to manage the events with more contextual and holistic information. The Asian earthquake and tsunami disaster event of December 26, 2004, a rare kind of event in the human civilization, has brought into fore several issues and challenges pertaining to the operational efficiency of International Charter. Charter was placed to a scenario where it had to perform and to demonstrate what it could do for the wounded South East Asian subcontinent. 

For Tsunami disaster in India, Charter was first activated by ISRO on 26 Dec. 2004, and by French Authorities for Srilanka on 27th Dec, and later by UNOOSA for Indonesia, Thailand and Maldives. The first two activations were supported by ISRO as ECO. The best of space imageries, in terms of its spectral, spatial and radiometric contents were made available, without any cost, to support the Charter. To make them actionable on ground, relevant service and value-adding chains were carried out at Project Mangers end. Finally, Charter proved its relevance and demonstrated the philosophy it is characterized with. The kind of response the Charter received from the user agencies from all around the world once again established its significance and role for major disasters and its wider user base.

There are however lessons to improve the Charter. Charter should support not only for post disaster – wherever feasible, support pre-disaster especially early warning. Linkage with potential knowledge agencies could be established to meet the requirements of disaster managers (data \& information needs) so as to build an integrated system. Turn around time has to be improved to respond on Near Real Time basis. The data acquisition requirements should be considered on top priority basis for earliest available opportunity without putting any constraints. Data transfer or communication issues need to be addressed to deal with the delays caused by huge data transfer requirements, local value addition and dissemination of processed data to user community in parallel to normal procedure of the charter (Space Agency – PM – AU: end user) can be considered to provide near real time support. Product and services from different resources, value addition, extract of information \& knowledge needs to be focused upon. For known disaster prone areas – inputs or guidelines may be generated for disaster management community concerned based on the observations through space system to expand the scope of the Charter. 

Abstract document

IAC-07-E3.2.05.pdf

Manuscript document

IAC-07-E3.2.05.pdf (🔒 authorized access only).

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