The global climate is becoming more and more unstable, which inevitably leads to an increase in the number of different natural disasters. And although environmental experts have a huge arsenal of prediction methods, many tragedies are still hard to avoid. The summer of 2022 alone was marked with some record-breaking weather events of disastrous consequences around the globe.
Luckily, technology doesn’t stop evolving while offering new and more advanced solutions to help predict, manage, and mitigate the impact of natural disasters. One of such technologies is remote sensing. Satellites keep opening new opportunities in terms of our planet’s observation, including climate change tracking and related disasters prediction. All thanks to modern satellites technical characteristics and the algorithms that help to extract and analyze the invaluable data from satellite imagery. Today, it’s easier than ever to find free satellite imagery of a particular location to use for further research. And those images are an unmatched source of information when it comes to visualization of natural disasters impact and its mitigation planning.
Natural Disasters in 2022
Disasters occurring in different parts of the world may seem unrelated at first. But when analyzing them in more detail, it quickly becomes clear that disasters are caused by the same causes, such as greenhouse gas emissions or unsustainable levels of consumption. The drivers of disasters are usually shaped by common economic and political causes. For instance, deforestation can be an illustration of how economic interests prevail over environmental protection. And here are some examples of natural disasters that have occurred just in the span of this year’s summer:
- Severe floods in Pakistan occurred after months of heavy rainfall that started in June. Free satellite images showed a third of the country covered with water. The disaster took hundreds of human lives and resulted in devastating infrastructure damage.
- Catastrophic rise in temperatures has led to the creation of a so-called heat dome over Africa, Europe, the Middle East, and Asia. The temperatures rose to numbers that have never been reached before, leading to devastating droughts and wildfires.
- Typhoon Hinnamnor is the most powerful tropical cyclone of this year and is expected to result in severe flooding and destruction in parts of Japan and South Korea.
Satellite Imagery: Disaster Prediction, Risk Management, and Damage Assessment
The general purpose of monitoring hazardous phenomena and processes in nature and technosphere is to improve the accuracy and reliability of emergency forecasts based on combining the intellectual, informational, and technological capabilities of various departments and organizations involved in the monitoring of certain types of hazards.
Monitoring data serves as a basis for forecasting. In general, forecasting or prediction is a creative research process, as a result of which hypothetical data about the future state of any object, phenomenon, or process are obtained. Emergency forecasting is a forward-looking reflection of the probability of occurrence and development of an emergency situation based on the analysis of the causes of its occurrence, its source in the past and present.
Space monitoring consists in continuous repeated obtaining of information about qualitative and quantitative characteristics of natural and anthropogenic objects and processes with the precise geographic reference by processing data received from the Earth remote sensing satellites mainly in the form of free high resolution satellite imagery made in the past or just a day ago. Space monitoring allows obtaining homogeneous and comparable in quality information for vast territories at the same time, which is practically unattainable for any ground surveys.
More so, companies like EOS Data Analytics are even launching their own satellite constellation to facilitate satellite images availability, affordability, and analytics with the intention of contributing to sustainability. Although the company’s EOS SAT constellation will mainly focus on agriculture, it will also provide valuable insights for experts in the domain of natural disasters monitoring.
Here are some of the tasks of disasters monitoring can be solved on the basis of space data:
- Observations of the state of the environment
- Assessment of hydrometeorological risks (dangerous natural phenomena and processes)
- Assessment of the safety of territories and hazardous production facilities
- Prediction of natural, natural-technogenic, man-made and socio-biological emergencies
- Detection and assessment of the scale and damage caused by emergencies
- Planning and assessment of effectiveness of measures to eliminate the consequences of emergencies.
- Planning of disaster mitigation measures.
Daily received live satellite images for free are widely used for risk assessment of emergencies (fires, droughts, floods and so on). Capabilities of space tools for emergency areas monitoring from space are defined by the satellite revisit time and spatial resolution. Free high resolution satellite images enable receiving accurate assessments of the degree of destruction of objects not only during natural disasters but also after technogenic accidents and catastrophes characterized by relatively small impact zones. Therefore, it’s possible to track big and small event across big and small territories even in the most remote areas of the world.