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The GMES Bureau is organising an exhibition from 15th till 30th April 2010 in Brussels.

The GMES Bureau is organising an exhibition on Urban Atlas from 15th till 30th April in the Berlaymont Piazza.

Urban Atlas is a digital mapping tool providing pan-European, reliable and inter-comparable urban planning data.

Compiled from thousands of pictures from European satellites, Urban Atlas provides coverage for detailed and cost-effective mapping of larger urban zones, yielding accurate land cover and usage data. Urban Atlas’ mission is to provide high-resolution hotspot mapping of changes in urban spaces and decision-support indicators for users such as city governments, the European Environment Agency (EEA) and European Commission departments.

Urban Atlas falls within the Land Monitoring of GMES (Global Monitoring for Environment and Security).

Registration is possible here

Source GMES.Info

ESA’s TIGER II initiative has selected 20 project proposals across Africa to receive support from Earth-observation technology to learn more about the water cycle and to improve water-monitoring resources.

TIGER II is based on the results and achievements of its precursor TIGER I, which sought to help African countries overcome water problems and to bridge Africa’s water information gap using Earth-observation (EO) technology.

Under TIGER I, EO techniques and methods were adapted to specific user needs and local conditions in close collaboration with African partners, such as the Lake Chad Basin Commission, the Observatoire du Sahara et du Sahel in Tunis, the Centre Royal de Télédétection Spatiale in Morocco, the Zambian Water Authorities and the Regional Centre for Mapping Resources for Development (RCMRD) in Nairobi. Projects focused on different aspects of water management including catchments characterisation, water quality, groundwater exploration, soil moisture and irrigated agriculture monitoring.

A major component of TIGER II is devoted to supporting African scientists, technical centres and water authorities to develop the scientific skills and the technical capacity to make the best use of EO technology to understand better, assess and monitor the status of the water resources in Africa. The initiative is also devoted to supporting the African partners to gain a better understanding of how EO may help assess the potential impacts of climate change on water resources and thus to establish a sound scientific basis for developing effective adaptation and mitigation measures across the continent.

The proposals selected for TIGER II, spanning some 13 African countries, include sustainable water use, flooding patterns, water quality monitoring, sedimentation modelling, groundwater resource assessment, hydrological and environmental aspects of wetlands and climate change impacts, among many others.

These projects will benefit from free access to EO data, software tools and scientific advice from international experts, as well as dedicated training and research stages in expert laboratories, support for participation in postgraduate courses and publishing scientific results.

The TIGER Capacity Building Facility (TCBF) has been established to support the 20 project proposals, which will receive specific technical assistance, training and scientific support to access and use EO datasets to achieve their projects’ objectives. In addition, according to the specific needs of each project, a scientific supervisor will be assigned to guide each project staff throughout the TIGER II phase, which runs until 2012.

The International Institute for Geo-Information Science and Earth Observation (ITC) of the University of Twente in the Netherlands coordinates all TCBF activities and maintains direct contact with TIGER project institutions. A consortium of scientific and technical experts, including the University of Delft, the University of Lisbon and the Belgium-based company VITO, will assist ITC in supporting the selected projects.

In addition, three regional offices in Africa, hosted by Niger’s Centre Regional de Formation et d’Application en Agrométéorologie et Hydrologie Opérationnelle (AGRHYMET), Nairobi’s RCMRD and South Africa’s Water Research Commission, will ensure that EO-based products and services will benefit the water management organisations in their region and will look for opportunities to reinforce TIGER activities on a regional level.

In order to identify the needs of the selected projects better and to set up a dedicated capacity building plan for each project, a workshop was held at ITC last December with representatives from all of the selected African projects. Based on the results of the workshop, a capacity-building plan is being prepared for the next two years.

The first training session dedicated to providing all of the selected teams with an initial introduction to EO technology, ESA data and the potential applications in the context of water resource management will be held this April in Egypt.

TIGER is an international endeavour that contributes to the strategy of the Group on Earth Observations (GEO) and involves the contributions of UNESCO (the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization), the Canadian Space Agency and the African Ministerial Council on Water (AMCOW).

Source ESA

A comprehensive atlas of all damage caused in Haiti by the magnitude 7.0 earthquake on 12 January 2010 is now available to help planning recovery and reconstruction measures.

The atlas, based on the comparison between predisaster satellite imagery and post-disaster aerial photos, provides an overview of building damage in the main affected cities in Haiti showing that almost 60,000 buildings, ten times more than initially estimated, were either destroyed or very heavily damaged.

The Haiti building damage atlas was produced by the United Nations’ Institute for Training and Research (UNITAR)/Operational Satellite Applications Programme (UNOSAT), the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre (JRC), and the World Bank in support to the Post Disaster Needs Assessment (PDNA) process led by the Government of Haiti.

The atlas provides a homogenous evidence base for the identification of recovery needs and the mobilisation of resources to finance the recovery and reconstruction. For each main city a separate atlas is produced, including an overview map of the atlas sheets, as well as individual sheets at a scale of 1:2,500 for A3 size hardcopy printouts. The damage to individual buildings is categorised according to the European Macroseismic Scale (EMS‐98) five‐level grading system, which includes a substantial to heavy damage state (Level 3), very heavy damage state (Level 4), and destruction damage state (Level 5).

Almost 60,000 buildings were found to be either completely destroyed or very heavily damaged in the densely populated parts of the eleven communes assessed. Residential buildings and buildings in slums bore the worst damage, particularly in Port-Au-Prince, Carrefour, Delmas and Leogane communes.

The atlas and the detailed damage assessments are the result of comparison and manual photo-interpretation of pre‐earthquake satellite imagery (circa 50 cm spatial resolution) and post‐earthquake aerial photos (circa 15 cm spatial resolution). In addition to the imagery analysis, UNOSAT, JRC and the World Bank have carried out in-field missions in cooperation with Haiti’s Centre National d’Information Geo-Spatiale (CNIGS).

The damage is now assessed to be ten times higher than first estimates given immediately after the event, which can be attributed to the availability of better resolution aerial data.

Background information

The atlas and the detailed damage assessments are the result of the three main operational remote sensing damage assessments carried out following the earthquake on 12 January by image analysts at UNITAR/UNOSAT, assisted by Swisstopo of Switzerland and the Remote Sensing Laboratories (RSL) of the University of Zurich, the JRC and the World Bank. Aerial photos were provided by the World Bank (World Bank‐ImageCat‐RIT Remote Sensing Mission), Google and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA); satellite imagery was derived from the GeoEye and Digitalglobe satellites.

UNITAR/UNOSAT received funding support from the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), the JRC received funding from the European Union Instrument for Stability, and The World Bank received funding through the Global Facility for Disaster Reduction and Recovery (GFDRR).

The PDNA Atlas series is available for download at:
http://www.unosat.org/asp/prod_free.asp?id=5

UNITAR: Palais des Nations, CH-1211 Geneva 10, Switzerland
Telephone: +41 76 4874997
E-mail:francesco.pisano_at_unitar.org
Web:www.unitar.org // www.unosat.org

The tendering process that will result in the supply of Europe’s next series of meteorological satellites, Meteosat Third Generation, has reached an advanced stage as ESA invites Thales Alenia Space to enter formal contract negotiations.

These negotiations follow rigorous evaluation of the proposals to build the Meteosat Third Generation (MTG) satellites – with the Tender Evaluation Board (TEB) meeting three times since October to review the offers.

Two consortia responded to the tender released last July; one led by Astrium Friedrichshafen, with Astrium Toulouse and Astrium Ottobrunn, and one led by Thales Alenia Space Cannes, with OHB Bremen and Kayser Threde Munich.

Both offers were rated ‘good’ technically and stayed below the expected financial envelope. However, owing to the lower price, the TEB recommended that contract negotiations should be made with Thales Alenia Space France.

If the negotiations are successful, the Executive will submit the contract proposal to ESA’s Industrial Policy Committee for approval and decision by the Member States participating in the programme. This is envisaged in June.

Building on Europe’s long heritage of monitoring the weather from space, the first MTG is expected to be launched in 2016.

ESA’s first Earth observation mission, Meteosat-1, was launched back in 1977 and was subsequently followed by another six Meteosats. The operation of the Meteosat satellites was formally handed over from ESA to Eumetsat in 1995. In 2002, the existing Meteosats were joined by the first Meteosat Second Generation (MSG) satellite, which entered service as Meteosat-8. A second MSG (Meteosat-9) was launched in 2005 and two further MSG satellites will guarantee continuity of service in the near future.

Ensuring the continuous operation of these weather satellites is vital for numerical weather prediction. From geostationary orbit 36 000 km above the equator, these satellites view a large portion of Earth. This vantage point enables rapidly evolving events to be continuously monitored for the use in weather forecasting.

The MTG series will provide significant improvement over the current Meteosat satellites and together with increasing computer power, will undoubtedly take weather forecasting to the next level.

Source ESA

From 2009 to 2018, emerging space programs are expected to launch 65 satellites, a four-fold increase over the previous decade10 years.

This increase in satellites is in direct relation to the number of countries developing an Earth observation (EO) programs – up from only eight in 1997 to an anticipated 34 by 2018 according to Euroconsult’s report Satellite-Based Earth Observation, Market Prospects to 2018.

The emergence of these “new” countries as satellite operators is primarily the result of their desire to develop autonomous space capabilities and industry know-how. With Earth observation satellites much cheaper to manufacture and launch compared to with other systems, such as satcom, they are often an entry point for countries seeking to develop a national space program.

Some of these emerging programs will go on to distribute their data commercially in an effort to realize a return on their satellite investment. This approach is not completely new; the U.S. Landsat program and the French SPOTSpot series have been commercializing data for more than 20 years. Other countries followed suit over the last ten10 years, such asincluding India, South Korea, Brazil and Taiwan. But with the commercial data market valued at $916 million in 2008 and expected to reach $3.9 billion by 2018, there is even more significant incentive for programs to look towards commercialization as their systems develop.

The report goes on to state that the market for commercial data surpassed $1 billion for the first time in 2009. The commercial data market is currently dominated by the three private operators – DigitalGlobe, GeoEye and SPOTSpot Image – whothat combined have 63% percent market share. Each company has grown strongly over the last five years, focusing on the provision of high-resolution data. Currently Their largest customer group is government defense and security agencies, with 62% percent of global data sales coming from this sector. To iensure that possible government budget changes will not dramaticallydrastically affect their bottom lines and to grow market share, these operators need to diversify their client bases in the coming years, possibly putting them on a collision course with emerging programs in their data distribution efforts.

Typically, data from emerging programs isare marketed as a low-cost alternative to data from private commercial operators. For example, pricing for ISRO’s the Indian Space Research Organisation’s 80cm-centimeter ground resolution Cartosat-2 satellite data marketed by Antrix equates to $8.60/km2 per square kilometer; data from the Sino-Brazilian CBERS-2B mission (2.7m-meter ground resolution) is are available for $0.14/km2 per square kilometer. By comparisoncontrast, a similar Level 1 processed image product from DigitalGlobe’s WorldView-1 satellite equates to $24/km2 per square kilometer.

Government defense and security customers require high-ground-resolution, high-accuracy data, delivered in a timely fashion. For this, commercial operators have a distinct advantage. Commercial operators’ satellites boast image accuracy in the range of 4-8m 4 to 8 meters of deviation, much more accurate than the 100m+ 100-plus meters of the high-resolution, low-cost solutions. Timeliness of data delivery is also crucial, with the more flexible commercial satellites’ cameras capable of a repeat pass in the one to three days range or even programmable for multiple images of the same area in a single pass, making them much more responsive than the low-cost solutions. Where a combination of high ground resolution, accuracy and timeliness is required, lower-cost data will have a difficult time competing.

With such solutions on the market, commercial operators may have difficulties with their more price-sensitive clients. But as DigitalGlobe and GeoEye are currently so dependent on a single client – the U.S. government (whowhich represents 75% percent and 39% percent of revenues in 2008, respectively, with GeoEye’s US government percentage to further increase with GeoEye-1 now operational) – developing additional sources of revenue is increasingly important. Given the number of competing low-cost solutions available, the first logical area of expansion seemingly is export markets to international governments for similar defense and security purposes. Sales to private enterprise have proved difficult in the past, but are expected to be driven by the oil and gas markets and emerging consumer-driven applications focusing on location-based services – again, application areas requiring higher accuracy and/or increased timeliness.

Where low-cost or free data solutions will benefit is in the EO Earth observation services market. To date, this area has not grown as fast as the rest of the overall EO Earth observation market, as operational services have struggled to emerge and service providers have had real difficulty demonstrating the cost-benefit of the EO Earth observation solution. High data prices were have been partially responsible, with data costing as much as 50% percent or more than of the total cost of a project. With an increasing volume of low-cost data available from numerous sources, service providers have the platform to develop value-added services at lower cost, thus overcoming the business case obstacle.

As an example, Landsat data was were made available globally for free of charge in 2008. Within the first six months, over 500,000 images from the satellite and satellite archive were distributed; this compares to compare this with the next best whole year distribution of 25,000 images (2001). When one considers the cost of a Landsat data series at $600 per scene ($3.3/km2 per square kilometer) prior to the policy change, one realizes the significant impact of cost on Earth observation data usage, particularly in research and development projects. Through GMES the Global Monitoring for Environment and Security (GMES) project, the Sentinel missions will similarly look to supply free operational data to government and industry free-of-charge with the plan to build operational services through public bodies.

As with Landsat data, however, no data in the first planned series of GMES Sentinel missions will be of high ground resolution. With this data available, it seems unlikely going forward that there will be commercial viability for data of moderate (10m+more than 10 meters) resolution.

Low-cost solutions from emerging space programs and free solutions from policy-driven initiatives will not have an impact on commercial operators at this stage. But increasingly capable offerings from emerging programs and hi-res solutions from established governments will start to compete with the commercial operators. To a degree, this is already happening – e.g. for example, through dual-use missions such as the Italian COSMOCosmo-SkymMed and the future French Pleiades mission commercialized by e-GEOS and SPOTSpot Image, respectively. At this time, data pricing from these two systems is similar (or likely to be similar) to their commercial counterparts with comparable offerings. Since there is no pressure to fund follow-up systems, there is a chance that prices will drop to increase their competitiveness in the marketplace.

This puts the commercial operators in a potentially precarious position; government customers are already critical, but overdependence on one client is never healthy, and potential scaling back of military options may impact their needs. As they seek new clients, they will run into competition from low-cost and free data solutions for price-sensitive private-sector customers. While other government customers (i.e., outside the U.S.) are viable options, commercial operators cannot afford to disregard the lucrative private-sector customers who will likely generate an increasing portion of data sales in the coming years.

To tap into this business, commercial operators will need to increasingly position themselves as providers of total geo-information solutions. This includes multiple data offerings, from proprietary satellites and distribution of third-party data to aerial data, value-adding and GIS-ready solutions. The primary objective for operators is to offer a prospective client a range of geospatial services. This is also likely to drive further consolidation in the market as the larger companies look to best position themselves to offer complete solutions.

Adam Keith (keith@ euroconsult-na.com) (keith @euroconsult-ec.com) is a senior analyst responsible for Earth observation projects at Euroconsult North America.

Source

Lockheed Martin Space Systems Company has been selected by GeoEye, Inc. to build the company’s next-generation, high-resolution Earth imaging satellite system known as GeoEye-2. Financial terms are not being disclosed at this time.

Lockheed Martin has begun start-up activities and procurement of long-lead components to support the earliest possible launch date for GeoEye-2. This effort will lead to a contract award for the design, engineering and manufacturing of the satellite and the associated command and control system.

Lockheed Martin Space Systems, a world leader in the most advanced space-based systems for government and commercial customers, designed and built the world’s first commercial, high-resolution, Earth-imaging satellite, IKONOS, which has been providing 0.82-meter ground resolution imagery to GeoEye’s customers around the globe for more than a decade.

These map-accurate images are used for applications in national security, environmental monitoring, state and local government, disaster assessment and relief, land management and for many other geospatial applications.

“GeoEye and Lockheed Martin have had a long and productive partnership since building and launching the first commercial remote sensing satellite,” said Joanne Maguire, executive vice president, Lockheed Martin Space Systems.

“Our GeoEye-2 solution will leverage our strong government and commercial satellite system expertise and focus on operational excellence and mission success to provide GeoEye with another world-class, high-performance spacecraft for its customers.”

Matthew O’Connell, GeoEye’s chief executive officer and president, said, “We look forward to working with Lockheed Martin again and eagerly anticipate the construction and successful launch of another cutting-edge satellite which will provide proven reliability and greatly enhanced imaging capabilities for our customers.”

Lockheed Martin’s GeoEye-2 solution will build on the company’s deep heritage and ability to execute within cost and schedule in this mission area and offer increased agility, resolution and flexibility over IKONOS and GeoEye-1.

This will enable the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) to provide critical geospatial situational awareness and global security information to intelligence analysts, war fighters and decision makers.

Commercial users will also benefit from access to GeoEye-2’s map-accurate color imagery. The spacecraft will feature a high-resolution ITT camera that has been in development for more than two years.

Source

Indonesia is intensifying efforts to map forest areas nationwide using remote-sensing satellite technology, to maximize on their role in absorbing greenhouse gas emissions, a seminar has heard.

The announcement was made first week March at the start of the three-day symposium of the 4th Asia-Pacific Global on Earth Observation System in Bali. Attending the event are delegations from 26 member states of the Group on Earth Observations (GEO).

The forest observations, being conducted by the National Aeronautics and Space Agency (Lapan), is aimed at collecting data on forest coverage and monitoring changes in the areas, including pinpointing fire hot spots.

Lapan remote-sensing unit deputy head Nur Hidayat said Indonesia had teamed up with Australia for the project.

“We’re looking to reduce the number of forest and peatland fires by 20 percent a year, so we’re continuously observing forests using remote-sensing satellite technology,” he said.

“The number of hot spots can now be monitored in real time.

“We’re intensifying our annual monitoring of forests to collect reliable and accurate data that can be used to calculate the forest’s capacity to absorb carbon emissions.”

Data collected by the agency will be used to draft a recommendation for follow-up action from other agencies, Hidayat said.

Indonesia is targeting to cut carbon emissions by 26 percent by 2020, or 2.95 gigatons of CO2, 14 percent of it to come from the forestry sector.

The country’s total forest cover is 98.5 million hectares, according to Forestry Ministry estimates. Islands with the highest coverage include Papua, which is 33 percent forest, and Kalimantan with 27.8 percent.

Lapan liaison director Ratih Dewanti Dimyati said the partnership with Australia was aimed at providing data on land changes for Indonesia’s National Carbon Accounting System (INCAS).

INCAS is a joint forest carbon partnership program between the two countries to support Indonesia in providing significant and cost-effective reduction of greenhouse gas emissions by reducing deforestation, encouraging reforestation and promoting sustainable forest management.
“We’re currently in the process of updating the previous data on forest areas nationwide, and we expect to complete it by the end of this year,” she said.

“However, because this is still the early stage of the observation, we can’t say conclusively if there has been any increase in deforestation or the number of hot spots.”

The agency’s will crosscheck its findings with those from the Australian team, to ensure the accuracy.
Forest fires are common across the country, particularly in Kalimantan and Sumatra.

The number of hot spots in Central Kalimantan has fluctuated wildly over the past 13 years, says the Environmental Systems Research Institute (ESRI) Indonesia.

In 2009, the figure was 4,860, up from 1,827 in the previous year and 2,793 in 2007.

Source

The sixth geoland Forum gathered more than 200 participants from the GMES Land community

On 24th and 25th March 2010 more than 200 participants from the GMES Land community gathered in Toulouse for the sixth geoland Forum. The forum was organised by geoland2 and hosted by Météo France.

The morning session of the first day of the event was dedicated to presenting the French GMES expectations and its perspectives. Speakers from Météo France and CNES outlined their activities related to GMES followed by a presentation of the French Ministry of Ecology, Energy, Sustainable Development and the Sea (MEEDDM), which highlighted the need for the GMES services. However, a stronger involvement of the Member States in the development of Land Service specifications and their evaluation is still required.

In the afternoon, the programmatic frame with regards to the GMES Initial Operations (GIO) implementation plan and the scope of GMES Land Services was presented by DG Enterprise. The German bottom-up approach of national land use/ land cover mapping, expectations to GIO in relation to upcoming reporting requirements and the current status of the GMES Space Component (GSC) data access were presented by speakers from the German Mapping Agency, the European Environmental Agency and the European Space Agency. The coordinator and representatives of the geoland2 project provided a conceptual update of the status of the global, continental and local services with regards to the progress achieved in terms of pre-operational performance and delivery and its translation into operational services.

The day concluded with a presentation about the E-Hype system (a pan-European hydrological modelling for environment and security), an application which is part of geoland2, and presentations that highlighted the synergies between geoland2 and the related projects MACC and VENUS.

Day 2 was divided into four parallel workshop sessions, that explored specific topics dedicated to Mapping and Monitoring, Infrastructure logistics in the Land Service Domain, Data Access to EO Data – Lessons Learnt and the Validation & Verification & Qualification & Certification activities.

All presentations can be downloaded here

UN-Spider

1. UN-SPIDER Technical Advisory Mission to Haiti in March 2010
2. UN-SPIDER carries out Technical Advisory Mission to Chile
3. UN-SPIDER meets SEGEPLAN to discuss upcoming Technical Advisory Mission to Guatemala
4. UN Subcommittee requests study on the establishment of a SpaceAid fund
5. UN-SPIDER Africa Workshop postponed
6. Understanding Risk â Join the Dialogue
7. ESA seeks to speed up emergency response
8. ESAâs Tiger II to support 20 water projects in Africa
9. DigitalGlobe’s WorldView-2 satellite elevation data verified to be accurate within 30 centimeters
10. Thales begins development of Sentinel 1B and 3B environmental satellites
11. New UN satellite standards to boost communications in emergencies
12. ‘Jugnu’ nano-satellite for vegetation monitoring developed

Reference

The FUSION user workshop is scheduled on May 19, 2010 in Berlin, Germany.

FUSION will be the first satellite constellation combining high resolution satellite imagery as known from the RapidEye satellites with MIR/TIR data similar to what the BIRD infrared payload produces. Combining 6.5 m GSD VIS/NIR images with 100 m GSD infrared images, FUSION will provide new data products and worldwide daily revisit capability for fields such as precision agriculture, food security, irrigation water management, inland water resource management, terrestrial ecosystem mapping, volcanology, and high resolution wildfire monitoring.

As FUSION has the potential to serve a wide variety of applications, we aim to optimise the set of requirements that the system design will be based on. The workshop offers a unique opportunity for users to learn about FUSION, express their information needs and discuss their requirements and thus influence this mission right from the start.

Workshop tracks include:

- Introduction to the FUSION project – FUSION’s high resolution earth observation capabilities – FUSION’s unique fire detection and monitoring features – Participants’ presentations – Special addresses and panel discussions

For more information about the FUSION User Workshop, please refer to the attached announcement

FUSION_UserWorkshop_Announcement.pdf

Workshop coordination
Lilit Kocharyan
email: kocharyan@rapideye.de
phone: +49 (0)3381 8904-529
fax: +49 (0)3381 8904-101
web: http://www.rapideye.de
RapidEye AG
Molkenmarkt 30
14776 Brandenburg an der Havel
Germany