The company has more than 10 years of research in the field of Environmental Protection, Land Use and Urban Planning, Disaster Management, Agricultural sector monitoring and Security using space and satellite technologies. During the last five years Aratos Technologies S.A. has developed some innovator systems and services to be able to provide satellite Earth Observation data.
Earth Observation
Satellites are capable of obtaining global spatial coverage and provide unique measurements of solar output, the Earth’s radiation budget, vegetation cover, oceans biomass productivity, atmospheric zone, greenhouse gas distributions, sea level, ocean surface conditions. Earth Observation satellite applications are very useful in the company because include: hazard monitoring and disaster assessment and they have proven their abilities to accurately monitor. Moreover Earth Observation satellites remain in place for long periods of time and they can highlight environmental changes occurring gradually. All these applications are used by the systems of Aratos Technologies S.A to deliver information about extreme events such as floods and droughts, the ozone hole, biological activity, coastal zones, deforestation, forest fires, urban development. These various observations are used extensively in real-time decision making and can be provide at the Local Authorities that have signed an agreement with the company.
Aratos Disaster Control System™ and Green SSLM are systems of Aratos Technologies S.A.
Aratos Disaster Control System™ provides prevention, response and recovery through high quality satellite data. The main objective of Aratos Disaster Control System is to manage natural disasters and monitor the area of interest in a 24 hours base through satellite. The last successful agreement signed a few days ago, when the company called to renew the agreement that had been signed a year ago for the first time with the prefecture of Grevena. The main users are Civil Protection Services, Local Authorities and Governments. Prefecture of Kozani,, Magnesia and Florina are some of the users of the system. The company the last five years makes very important agreements with the Local Authorities of Greece but also with companies and organizations, specialized in space sector in Europe.
Aratos Disaster Control works in three stages Prevention, Crisis Management and Damage Assessment. Monitoring using satellite is made daily every 15 minutes for all stages of the system. This moment Aratos Technologies S.A. receives data through privately owned station to receive data from 26 satellites. Aratos Disaster Control uses data which are collected from a ground reception station for satellite data. Satellite data are processed with specialized software.
During the Pre-Fire phase a regularly updated cartography of a region is provided, accompanied by high resolution digital maps.
The service includes:
•Detail mapping of concrete regions (urban, semi-urban, rural, forestalls etc.) and infrastructures (buildings, populated centers, other infrastructures) using recent satellite imageries.
•Estimation of fire risk index, that is based in various parameters like the vegetation index, the ground topology, the infrastructure of the area, the human intervention in the nature, the temperature, the force and direction of wind.
The services provided for the response phase (CRISIS) involve:
•Rapid fire mapping for large fire events, delivering mapping products and damage assessment for fire events with highest update rate 15-30 minutes and
•SMS-Email alert to registered users.
The set of services provided for the recovery phase (POST-FIRE) involve:
•High Accuracy Burn Scan Mapping.
•Assessment of cultivatable and forest areas affected.
•Categorization of burned areas (forestal, agricultural, inhabited regions).
•Complete damage assessment and mapping of the affected region. The mapping is produced on scale: 1:5000, 1:25000, 1:100000, depending on the requirements and the needs.
Green SSLM (Green Space Services for Local Monitoring) is an efficient and useful service of environment using satellite data. The Green Space Services for Local Monitoring (GreenSSLM) utilize the cutting edge technology based on satellite born data and integrate the complex data and models in order to provide useful and easy to understand indicators for decision makers, society and individuals.
The area of Prespes in Greece which is an area protected by the Ramsar Convention and characterized as Nationals Park uses Green SSLM system because needs special treatment. Green SSLM is especially designed for monitoring the environment and the environmental changes. It is an efficient and useful system which can provide to the area of Prespes information for the sustainable growth. This system uses indicators which are based on DPSIR (Driving forces, Pressure, State, Impact, Response) framework used by most international institutions. The indicators are describing what is happening to the environment in the area of Prespes and they can calculate what is needed.
The monitoring process is done using advanced Earth Observation satellites and techniques, combined with in-situ data and measurements. The complexity of the processing such huge and often confusing data is hidden to the user and a valuable and easy to understand indicators are presented to him. In addition a thematic digital and hardcopy maps of the region are produced from which a non specialist could easily determine the situation in the region, as well as, to decide if needed on specific measures and actions.
Events
The main aim of Aratos Technologies S.A. is the civil protection and for this reason participated in Polis 2009, from 26 to 29 November 2009 Aratos Technologies S.A., the 7th International Exhibition of Local Authorities, public-social sectors and private companies, which took place in the International Exhibition Center of Thessaloniki. The exhibition was about modern services and products which aim at a better quality of life of the citizens.
News
Furthermore Aratos Technologies S.A. has signed an agreement with Antrix Corporation Limited to provide for the next 5 years, high quality satellite imagery from the Satellite Cartosat-2. With this agreement Aratos Technologies S.A. will provide satellite imagery in order to monitor the environmental situation of an area, cartography.
Aratos Technologies S.A. is also a reseller in Greece of the products and services of Flyby and WFS.
Project SEOCA
SEOCA is an EU-funded project of the Seventh Framework Programme (FP7) and its main objective is to further strengthen the cooperation between Europe and the countries of Central Asia within GEO (Group on Earth Observations) by implementing a set of activities aimed at building GEO-related capacity in the domain of Earth Observation in the target countries. SEOCA intends to promote European GEO-technologies in the region of Central Asia as a platform solution for the regional development challenges. Totally, there are eight participating countries in SEOCA; Germany, Turkey, Greece, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Turkmenistan.
Furthermore, SEOCA focuses on the study and evaluation of the existing needs and capacities of the Central Asian countries for EO (Earth Observation) information application, gathering and distribution. As a result the consortium expects that SEOCA will radically increase acceptance of GEOSS (The Global Earth Observation System of Systems) technologies by the regional governments for national environmental services, meteorology, natural hazards prevention, geological explorations, etc. Finally, SEOCA is going to start in February 2010.
Aratos Technologies S.A. – the company specialized in space sector and satellites- is a private company located in Patras, Greece, has been included among the top companies in Europe and ensures totally quality services and products in space sector.