April 2, 2019
ARIA Team Uses Multiple Satellites to Create Flood Proxy Maps for Mozambique // Landsat 8 Used to Identify Landslides and Flood Areas in Zimbabwe from Cyclone Idai // Suomi NPP VIIRS Detects Hundreds of Wildfires in Venezuela
April 1, 2019
NASA and global humanitarian organization Mercy Corps are partnering to help vulnerable communities in some of the most fragile places on Earth better withstand challenges such as population growth, resource scarcity and climate change. Eighty percent of Nigeriens are subsistence farmers. NASA and Mercy Corps are exploring how NASA’s satellite measurements can help the drought-prone, farming-intensive country create sustainable livelihoods for people like this Nigerien woman watering her garden. Credits: Mercy Corps/Sean Sheridan Under a three-year Space Act Agreement signed on March 29, the partnership will combine NASA’s Earth observation capabilities, including satellite data, imagery, and modeling and analysis, with Mercy Corps’ local insights and development expertise in more than 40 countries. Projects will assist communities in building resilience to complex stresses and making decisions that have long-term benefits for people and the environment. “This partnership enables NASA and Mercy Corps to amplify our collective capacities to reach communities in the most risk-prone regions of the world with the information they need the most,” said David Green, disasters program director in NASA’s Earth Science Division, Washington. “As NASA seeks to expand our understanding of the integrated Earth system from global to local scales, Mercy Corps’ extensive and practical knowledge of the human element – social, environmental, economic and political – is critical.”
March 26, 2019
VIIRS "Black Marble" Product Used to Track Damage and Power Outages from Cyclone Idai // ESA Sentinal-1 SAR Data Used to Gauge Extent of Flooding in the Midwest // GPM IMERG Adds Up Rainfall from Cyclone Idai to Monitor Flooding in Mozambique
March 26, 2019
Click here to view the full tweet and video. Dr. Amber Soja's work using remote sensing to study links between wildland fire and climate change was highlighted by NASA Earth on Twitter this week. The tweet came as a salute to women in science on International Women's Day. An interview with Dr. Soja posted on Twitter describes how she and her Applied Science teams use NASA data to reduce the cost of fire suppression through operational awareness, fire mitigation and prescribed landscape fires. Dr. Soja further describes how NASA data are used to identify deviations in Northern hemisphere, upper latitude landscape fires that are largely driven by changing climate. The interview has captured the attention of more than 16,000 followers, spreading valuable knowledge of Earth science.
March 19, 2019
MODIS Helps Researchers Track Midwest "Bomb Cyclone" Storm System // Suomi NPP VIIRS Tracks Location and Spread of Fires in Victoria, Australia to Aid Firefighters // GPM Measures Precipitation in Destructive Cyclone Idai in Mozambique to Predict Potential Floods and Landslides
February 26, 2019
On February 21st, Jeremy Kirkendall gave an overview of the NASA Disasters Mapping Portal during a panel session at the United States Department of Agriculture's (USDA) Agricultural Outlook Forum. There were approximately 75 people in attendance for the talk, which was very well received. Several new contacts were established with the USDA disasters staff and other researcheres who wanted to colloborate and share data with the Disasters Program. A number of people, including foreign users, expressed interest in ingesting near real-time services from the Mapping Portal to help with agricultural outlook forecasts and disaster recovery. The industry was very receptive of new data as they are always tyring to forecast the cost and yield of product.
February 1, 2019
On Wednesday January 30th, members of the NASA Disasters Program hosted a one hour Special Interest Group (SIG) session at the Esri Federal GIS Conference in Washington, DC. There were around 40 attendees present, including representatives from USDA, the World Bank, U.S. Census Bureau, USACE, Leidos, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Blue Raster, Esri, among others.
January 29, 2019
The NASA Disasters Program was highlighted at Esri’s Federal Geographic Information System (GIS) conference plenary session on Tuesday, January 29, 2019 in Washington, D.C. The presentation was viewed by several thousand conference attendees and introduced the audience to the breadth of work in NASA’s earth science program. Jack Dangermond, the founder and owner of Esri, described how different agencies were utilizing their GIS products to respond to disasters through story maps. Dangermond featured a slide which included NASA’s response efforts to the Kilauea Eruption, Hurricane Florence, and California Wildfire story maps. Later in the presentation, the Disasters Portal was also shown as part of a “success story” of content feeding into FEMA’s GeoPlatform, created as a result of the Geospatial Data Act. The NASA Disasters Program will also be hosting a Special Interest Group meeting at the conference on Wednesday, January 30. This will serve as an opportunity to highlight the program’s important work during 2018, as well as provide an overview of the program, the NASA Disasters Portal and an opportunity to engage and learn from stakeholders.
November 13, 2018
"Innovation Now" is a daily 90-second radio series and podcast that gives listeners a front row seat to hear compelling stories of revolutionary ideas, emerging technologies and the people behind the concepts that are shaping our future. In the November 9th 2018 episode "Fire and Air", NASA Wildfire researcher Amber Soja was interviewed on how NASA uses the vantage of space to safeguard our future.
November 6, 2018
CWU GPS Network in Roseburg, Oregon The NASA Earth Science Disasters program works to improve disaster resilience by working with other organizations that have valuable insight on natural hazards. Tim Melbourne, Professor at Central Washington University (CWU) and Director of the Pacific Northwest Geodetic Array (PANGA) Geodesy Laboratory works with the Disasters team to provide valuable information on earthquake and tsunami activity in the Pacific Northwest. PANGA analyzes and measures crustal deformation which is the changing earth’s surface caused by tectonic forces that are accumulated in earth’s crust that causes and accompanies large earthquakes and many tsunamis. Measuring and analyzing the changing earth’s surface helps agencies, governments and other entities mitigate natural hazards throughout the circum-Pacific Ring of Fire, where natural hazards include earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, landslides and coastal sea-level encroachment.Melbourne’s group at CWU provides real-time analysis of information streamed in from their real-time GPS systems that have been installed by CWU throughout the Pacific Northwest as well as by many other network operators throughout the world. Analyses from these systems are then passed on to NASA, The National Weather Service, NOAA, and other agencies to research, reduce and mitigate natural disasters. At NASA in particular, Melbourne works directly with the Disasters program to analyze seismic activity from an earthquake that has occurred and provide valued input to the team on information that can be relayed back to NASA partners and stakeholders such as FEMA.