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ICT offers innovative options for early warning systems and disaster relief |
A researcher at the Meraka Institute of the CSIR, Philip Frost, will participate in two European Union Framework Programme 7 (EU FP7) projects over the next few years. The Flemish Institute for Technology (VITO) is the lead partner, along with numerous European and African partners.
The first, titled DevCoCast, focuses on GEONETCast applications for and by developing countries. The DevCoCast project plans to disseminate and support the use of environmental data to and from developing countries.
The CSIR contribution will be to produce daily near real-time moderate resolution imaging spectroradiometer (MODIS) active data in the form of ASCII files. (ASCII codes represent text in computers, communications equipment and other devices that work with text.) These will be transferred to the European Organisation for the Exploitation of Meteorological Satellites (EUMETSAT) for dissemination via the GEONETCast system. The main purpose of the European Organisation for the Exploitation of Meteorological Satellites (EUMETSAT) is to deliver weather and climate-related satellite data, images and products - 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.
With each of the MODIS satellite overpasses (four times per day) over southern Africa, the MODIS DB system at the CSIR Satellite Applications Centre will create a fire product that will enable regional users to download and integrate the product into their own geographic information systems (GIS) systems without having to run their own MODIS DB system.
Frost explains, "The project will prove that the GEONETCast concept works efficiently all over the globe and will pave the road for a widespread usage of GEONETCast in the future." GEONETCast is a near real-time, global network of satellite-based data dissemination systems designed to distribute space-based, air-borne and in situ data, metadata and products to diverse communities.
In the past, GEONETCast has been used to disseminate data produced by European entities to developing countries (North-South one-way). Frost points out, "A new important step is proposed in the project - the environmental data come from the developing country and are disseminated to the developing country. This will allow active inclusivity for developing countries in the GEO effort.
"They will not only receive information but also add value to this information as well as fostering the exploitation of this added value, through a wide dissemination of their products."
Frost notes the important benefit of South-South exchanges (as the experience acquired in some developing country will be visible by other countries) with big potential for cross fertilisation.
The second FP7 project, AÏDA, deals with advancing ICT for disaster and risk management (DRM) in Africa. The AÏDA project is aimed at acquiring and sharing knowledge about affordable ICT solutions in Africa to reduce the risk of natural disasters and to improve the capacity to respond to disasters.
"Many developing countries in Africa are exposed to serious environmental disaster risks," Frost points out. "Disasters can often not be prevented, but the loss caused by these events could be minimised by the use of ICT solutions."
In the disaster mitigation and preparation phase, ICT can be used widely to create early warning systems while in the immediate aftermath of a disaster, other ICT solutions could be used for emergency relief. In addition, GIS and remote sensing software could be used effectively in all phases of DRM.
The CSIR will develop a customised version of the Advanced Fire Information System (AFIS) for the Nelspruit Fire Fighting Association (FFA), located in Mpumalanga. The incident command centre at the Nelspruit air field is responsible for coordinating all vegetation fire fighting in Mpumalanga, Limpopo and Gauteng.
Due to the high number of fires within these provinces during winter (in excess of 50 fires at any given time), preference needs to be given to fires with a higher probability of becoming a disastrous fire.
The current system is based on phone calls from the public received by the command centre. With each report, a spotter plane is deployed to the scene to investigate the seriousness of the fire. Water-bomber planes and fire fighting helicopters are then deployed to start fire suppression.
The internet connection to the Nelspruit FFA is very slow and unreliable, due to its remote location outside Nelspruit. The AÏDA project will enable the distribution of fire-related products through GEONETCAST to a dedicated fire information system for the Nelspruit FFA.
Frost applauds the broad objectives of the AÏDA project to assess natural hazards, the vulnerability of the communities and disaster risks in Africa, and assess the role of ICT-based systems in each hazard category. Furthermore, it will explore the ICT trends and needs for the future and test the usefulness of GEONETCast as an alert system.
Additional deliverables are to share this information with all DRM stakeholders in Africa (by workshops and other mechanisms) and prepare three showcases of operational African DRM systems for demo at these workshops.
Emphasis is given to the promotion and support of the technology take-up for use in other disasters; participants are also expected to liaise with any new project in DRM with a significant involvement of African partners.
A second group of Meraka Institute researchers - Dr Anwar Vahed, Graeme McFerren and Terence van Zyl - will be participating in the Integrated Risk Management for Africa (IRMA) FP7 project. The University of Luxembourg leads the project; consortium members include the CSIR, Thales Alenia Space and Cisco.
IRMA aims to demonstrate a rapidly deployable ICT-based solution for public warnings and emergency management. The goal is to mitigate the impact of natural disasters and possible consequential humanitarian crisis.
Vahed explains, "The project will address the availability and reliability of defined services and existing and new networks to ensure public safety communication. It will leverage redundant communication channels, wherever possible, and use automatic redirection or transformation of communications in case of network failures." 'Bridging' networks using the Internet Protocol (IP), with particular emphasis on leveraging IP version 6 (Ipv6), will become an enabler for providing the new functionalities. The general architecture of IRMA is 'system-of-systems' based.
Outputs of this project are scenarios involving at least two hazards in African countries such as Morocco, Cameroon, Senegal and Mozambique. Vahed notes, "In sub-Saharan countries, fires - specifically wildfires - act adversely on natural resources. An early warning email system will notify stakeholders of a fire in or near a specified protected area in Senegal and neighbouring countries." The CSIR's experience in wildfire alerting will be brought to bear on these applications.
Mozambique, the second use case, is prone to a range of natural disasters, such as cyclones, drought, floods, epidemics, pest infestations and landslides. The devastating floods of 2000 resulted in the loss of about 800 lives and the damage was estimated at over US $450 m.
For more information, contact
Philip Frost or
Dr Anwar Vahed
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