E-geos Capabilities in Rapid Emergency Response Two Case-studies: L’aquila Earthquake and Parma/pepang Typhoon

This paper describes two recent real life end-to-end experiences that e-GEOS had in the field of rapid response to emergency situations in 2009: L’Aquila earthquake in Italy (April 2009) and Parma / Pepang typhoon in the Philippines (October 2009). In both cases public institutions and no profit organizations (NPO) received support on a best effort basis through a) fast and privileged access to both SAR/optical data, b) rapid damage assessment mapping c) flexible and interoperable geospatial services delivery. Fast and privileged access to SAR data is granted through the direct tasking and data downlink of Cosmo-SkyMed constellation, while commercial agreements with major optical satellite operators allows a rapid data tasking and reception from IKONOS, Geoeye-1 and Quickbird. e-GEOS team’s capabilities in thematic mapping are used for information extraction and damage assessment in case of both natural and man-made disasters; special attention is paid to automated and semi-automated feature extraction and map generation techniques (e.g. flood detection, map template generation). Finally, e-GEOS Service Platform, on a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) model, allows the delivery of geospatial products (raster and vector layers, thematic maps) in the most efficient and interoperable way based on standard OGC Web Services and a dedicated WebGIS or Google based solutions. These two case-studies highlight that a privileged access to satellite data is vital in order to ensure effectiveness to EO based information during an emergency, where timeliness is the first goal. Moreover, the capacity to adapt the delivery mechanism to a wide range of user’s schemas enlarges the product usability. Finally, the rush access to both raster and vector reference databases is crucial when basic information are needed in a very short time frame. * Corresponding author.