The CEOS Recovery Observatory Pilot Hosford, S.; Proy, C.; Giros, A. ...
International archives of the photogrammetry, remote sensing and spatial information sciences.,
01/2015, Letnik:
XL-7/W3, Številka:
7
Journal Article, Conference Proceeding
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
Over the course of the last decade, large populations living in vulnerable areas have led to record damages and substantial loss of life in mega-disasters ranging from the deadly Indian Ocean tsunami ...of 2004 and Haiti earthquake of 2010; the catastrophic flood damages of Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and the Tohoku tsunami of 2011, and the astonishing extent of the environmental impact of the Deepwater Horizon explosion in 2009. These major catastrophes have widespread and long-lasting impacts with subsequent recovery and reconstruction costing billions of euros and lasting years. While satellite imagery is used on an ad hoc basis after many disasters to support damage assessment, there is currently no standard practice or system to coordinate acquisition of data and facilitate access for early recovery planning and recovery tracking and monitoring. CEOS led the creation of a Recovery Observatory Oversight Team, which brings together major recovery stakeholders such as the UNDP and the World Bank/Global Facility for Disaster Reduction and Recovery, value-adding providers and leading space agencies. The principal aims of the Observatory are to: 1. Demonstrate the utility of a wide range of earth observation data to facilitate the recovery and reconstruction phase following a major catastrophic event; 2. Provide a concrete case to focus efforts in identifying and resolving technical and organizational obstacles to facilitating the visibility and access to a relevant set of EO data; and 3. Develop dialogue and establish institutional relationships with the Recovery phase user community to best target data and information requirements; The paper presented here will describe the work conducted in preparing for the triggering of a Recovery Observatory including support to rapid assessments and Post Disaster Needs Assessments by the EO community.
WCDRR and the CEOS activities on disaters Petiteville, I.; Ishida, C.; Danzeglocke, J. ...
International archives of the photogrammetry, remote sensing and spatial information sciences.,
04/2015, Letnik:
XL-7/W3, Številka:
7
Journal Article, Conference Proceeding
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
Agencies from CEOS (Committee on Earth Observation Satellites) have traditionally focused their efforts on the response phase. Rapid urbanization and increased severity of weather events has led to ...growing economic and human losses from disasters, requiring international organisations to act now in all disaster risk management (DRM) phases, especially through improved disaster risk reduction policies and programmes. As part of this effort, CEOS agencies have initiated a series of actions aimed at fostering the use of Earth observation (EO) data to support disaster risk reduction and at raising the awareness of policy and decision-makers and major stakeholders of the benefits of using satellite EO in all phases of DRM. CEOS is developing a long-term vision for sustainable application of satellite EO to all phases of DRM. CEOS is collaborating with regional representatives of the DRM user community, on a multi-hazard project involving three thematic pilots (floods, seismic hazards and volcanoes) and a Recovery Observatory that supports resilient recovery from one major disaster. These pilot activities are meant as trail blazers that demonstrate the potential offered by satellite EO for comprehensive DRM. In the framework of the 2015 3rd World Conference on Disaster Risk Reduction (WCDRR), the CEOS space agencies intend to partner with major stakeholders, including UN organizations, the Group on Earth Observations (GEO), international relief agencies, leading development banks, and leading regional DRM organisations, to define and implement a 15-year plan of actions (2015- 2030) that responds to high-level Post-2015 Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction priorities. This plan of action will take into account lessons learned from the CEOS pilot activities.
This paper presents the work that has been conducted by ESA during the last year in the field of OpenGis Web Mapping Technologies using in particular the IONIC software component suite. After some ...considerations on the difficulties encountered when distributing Earth Observation via internet, the potential benefit of using web mapping components is highlighted. ESA's initial implementation and use of this new technology is then described. The distribution of a large dataset of active fires (>300,000 fires) derived from ATSR via a Web Feature Server is described. The use of Web Map Server to enhance the user interface of the ESA Multi-Mission Catalog is then described in a second part.
CryoSat is the first ESA Earth Explorer Opportunity mission. It is designed to remotely sense the Earth's ice-covered surfaces using a new concept of radar altimeter instrument. It will use synthetic ...aperture radar and radar interferometry techniques in addition to conventional nadir looking pulse limited technique to provide superior measurements of surface elevation over both the continental ice sheets and sea ice. In the frame of a European tender competition, Advanced Computer Systems SpA has been awarded by ESA in 2001 for the design and development of the Payload Data Segment (PDS) and of the Instrument Processing Facility (IPF) infrastructures for the CryoSat Ground Segment. With more than twenty years of experience in design, developing and delivery of Earth Observation Data processing systems, Advanced Computer Systems SpA (ACS), based in Rome, Italy, is a leading firm in this field. More than one hundred operational systems are today in operation in 25 countries, within and outside Europe, mostly running 24 hours a day, ingesting and processing many of the available EO satellites like Landsat, SPOT, ERS, JERS, SRTM, Radarsat, Envisat. The aim of this paper is to provide an overview of the developed infrastructure.
Envisat User Services Petiteville, I; Potin, P; Barois, O ...
E.S.A. bulletin,
06/2001
106
Journal Article
The User Services will play a major role within the Envisat Payload Data Segment (PDS). Based on Internet technologies and a distributed architecture, they provide efficient access to Envisat ...products and information and offer a wide variety of on-line services to the user community. (Author)
This article aims at questioning the idea that international organizations (IOs) are 'depoliticized' by nature. Based on a review of the literature in sociology, political science, and anthropology ...about IOs, the purpose is to provide an analysis of the dialectic about politicization and depoliticization in IOs. We identify the main processes through which depoliticization is operated by IOs: the use of ethics and norms, the political neutralization of their official rhetoric, and the resorting to multiform expertise as a means of apolitical self-legitimization. We also explore the factors that may explain this tendency to depoliticize: their problematic status in regard to democratic theory, the diplomatic constraints attached to the intergovernmental structure of their managing bodies, and the administrative and cultural constraints that befall IOs' bureaucracies. Finally, we try to go beyond the concept of depoliticization by stressing the consequences of politicization that stem from IOs' resilient political rhetoric and from the ethical norms and expertise produced by IOs. Because IOs cannot totally eliminate political controversy and debates, the idea of 'international depoliticized governance' as a result of IOs activity should be put into perspective.
This work proposes a Visual Predictive Control (VPC) scheme adapted to the autonomous navigation problem among static obstacles. To do so, it is necessary to cope with several issues which by now ...limit the use of VPC in this context. Among them, we focus on the following ones: the need for precise prediction models to improve the task realization; the need for a long prediction horizon which is required to perform long range displacements and guarantee stability, but also results in a high computational burden and a more difficult implementation ; the possible optimization problem evolution at every iteration due to unexpected events (e.g., detection of new obstacles), which leads to non convex problems and therefore makes difficult its resolution. The proposed VPC allows to tackle the above mentioned challenges. Based on a more accurate prediction model relying on an exact integration method, it integrates constraints to deal with actuator saturation, obstacle avoidance along the trajectory and stability. To deal with the two last mentioned challenges, the classical VPC scheme has been extended with two methods: the first one allowing to relax some constraints on the control inputs to reduce the computational burden; the second one for adequately refining the optimized trajectory to avoid local minima when the optimization problem evolves during the navigation. The proposed approach has been evaluated and compared to other VPC configurations. The obtained results show than it runs 60 times faster than classical configurations for similar performances.
This work focuses on the control of a camera mounted on a differential drive robot via a VPC (Visual Predictive Control) scheme. First, an exact model of the visual feature prediction is presented ...for this robotic system. Next, relying on the equivalent command vector concept, a parallel implementation on a GPU (Graphics Processing Unit) of the computation of the cost function and its gradient is presented. Finally, results show that the proposed approach is more accurate than the ones classically used and can be up to six times faster than CPU-based (Central Processing Unit) one for large prediction horizons and numerous visual features. It then becomes possible to implement a VPC controller running sufficiently fast to perform a navigation tasks, while guaranteeing the closed-loop stability by relying on large prediction horizons.
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