NASA Earth Science Disasters Program Response Activities During Hurricanes Harvey, Irma and Maria in 2017
No abstract available
Molthan, Andrew↗
SEARCH · Search NASA
Results for “Disaster Response”
Search indexed NASA NTRS and DOE OSTI research on propulsion, heat transfer, battery materials and energy systems. Follow report and document links to the original sources.
Quote a phrase for an exact phrase match. Source license links do not imply unrestricted reuse.
NASA Earth Science Disasters Program Response Activities During Hurricanes Harvey, Irma, and Maria in 2017
No abstract available
Bell, Jordan↗
Hurricane Season 2017: A NASA Disasters Program Response Perspective
No abstract available
Bell, Jordan↗
NASA Disasters Program Response to the 2020 California Wildfires
No abstract provided
Vernier, Jean-Paul↗
Near Real-Time Applications of Earth Remote Sensing for Response to Meteorological Disasters
Numerous on‐orbit satellites provide a wide range of spatial, spectral, and temporal resolutions supporting the use of their resulting imagery in assessments of disasters that are meteorological in nature. This presentation will provide an overview of recent use of Earth remote sensing by NASA's Short‐term Prediction Research and Transition (SPoRT) Center in response to disaster activities in 2012 and 2013, along with case studies supporting ongoing research and development. The SPoRT Center, with support from NASA's Applied Sciences Program, has explored a variety of new applications of Earth‐observing sensors to support disaster response. In May 2013, the SPoRT Center developed unique power outage composites representing the first clear sky view of damage inflicted upon Moore and Oklahoma City, Oklahoma following the devastating EF‐5 tornado that occurred on May 20. Subsequent ASTER, MODIS, Landsat‐7 and Landsat‐8 imagery help to identify the damaged area. Higher resolution imagery of Moore, Oklahoma were provided by commercial satellites and the recently available International Space Station (ISS) SERVIR Environmental Research and Visualization System (ISERV) instrument. New techniques are being explored by the SPoRT team in order to better identify damage visible in high resolution imagery, and to monitor ongoing recovery for Moore, Oklahoma. Other applications are being developed to refine light source detections with the VIIRS day‐night band and to map hail during the growing season through combination of available satellite and radar imagery. The aforementioned products and support are not useful unless they are distributed in a timely manner and within an appropriate decision support system. This presentation will provide an update on ongoing activities to support inclusion of these data sets within the NOAA National Weather Service Damage Assessment Toolkit, which allows meteorologists in the field to consult available satellite imagery while performing their damage assessment.
Molthan, Andrew L.↗
Near Real-Time Applications of Earth Remote Sensing for Response to Meteorological Disasters
Numerous on‐orbit satellites provide a wide range of spatial, spectral, and temporal resolutions supporting the use of their resulting imagery in assessments of disasters that are meteorological in nature. This presentation will provide an overview of recent use of Earth remote sensing by NASA's Short‐term Prediction Research and Transition (SPoRT) Center in response to disaster activities in 2012 and 2013, along with case studies supporting ongoing research and development. The SPoRT Center, with support from NASA's Applied Sciences Program, has explored a variety of new applications of Earth‐observing sensors to support disaster response. In May 2013, the SPoRT Center developed unique power outage composites representing the first clear sky view of damage inflicted upon Moore and Oklahoma City, Oklahoma following the devastating EF‐5 tornado that occurred on May 20. Subsequent ASTER, MODIS, Landsat‐7 and Landsat‐8 imagery help to identify the damaged area. Higher resolution imagery of Moore, Oklahoma were provided by commercial satellites and the recently available International Space Station (ISS) SERVIR Environmental Research and Visualization System (ISERV) instrument. New techniques are being explored by the SPoRT team in order to better identify damage visible in high resolution imagery, and to monitor ongoing recovery for Moore, Oklahoma. Other applications are being developed to refine light source detections with the VIIRS day‐night band and to map hail during the growing season through combination of available satellite and radar imagery. The aforementioned products and support are not useful unless they are distributed in a timely manner and within an appropriate decision support system. This presentation will provide an update on ongoing activities to support inclusion of these data sets within the NOAA National Weather Service Damage Assessment Toolkit, which allows meteorologists in the field to consult available satellite imagery while performing their damage assessment.
Molthan, Andrew L.↗
Recommended satellite imagery capabilities for disaster management
This study explores the role that satellite imaging systems might play in obtaining information needed in the management of natural and manmade disasters. Information requirements which might conceivably be met by satellite were identified for over twenty disasters. These requirements covered pre-disaster mitigation and preparedness activities, disaster response activities, and post-disaster recovery activities. The essential imaging satellite characteristics needed to meet most of the information requirements are 30 meter (or finer) spatial resolution, frequency of observations of one week or less, data delivery times of one day or less, and stereo, synoptic all-weather coverage of large areas in the visible, near infrared, thermal infrared and microwave bands. Of the current and planned satellite systems investigated for possible application to disaster management, Landsat-D and SPOT appear to have the greatest potential during disaster mitigation and preparedness activities, but all satellites studied have serious deficiencies during response and recovery activities. Several strawman concepts are presented for a satellite system optimized to support all disaster management activities.
Richards, P. B.↗
Aggregation Tool to Create Curated Data albums to Support Disaster Recovery and Response
Despite advances in science and technology of prediction and simulation of natural hazards, losses incurred due to natural disasters keep growing every year. Natural disasters cause more economic losses as compared to anthropogenic disasters. Economic losses due to natural hazards are estimated to be around $6-$10 billion dollars annually for the U.S. and this number keeps increasing every year. This increase has been attributed to population growth and migration to more hazard prone locations such as coasts. As this trend continues, in concert with shifts in weather patterns caused by climate change, it is anticipated that losses associated with natural disasters will keep growing substantially. One of challenges disaster response and recovery analysts face is to quickly find, access and utilize a vast variety of relevant geospatial data collected by different federal agencies such as DoD, NASA, NOAA, EPA, USGS etc. Some examples of these data sets include high spatio-temporal resolution multi/hyperspectral satellite imagery, model prediction outputs from weather models, latest radar scans, measurements from an array of sensor networks such as Integrated Ocean Observing System etc. More often analysts may be familiar with limited, but specific datasets and are often unaware of or unfamiliar with a large quantity of other useful resources. Finding airborne or satellite data useful to a natural disaster event often requires a time consuming search through web pages and data archives. Additional information related to damages, deaths, and injuries requires extensive online searches for news reports and official report summaries. An analyst must also sift through vast amounts of potentially useful digital information captured by the general public such as geo-tagged photos, videos and real time damage updates within twitter feeds. Collecting and aggregating these information fragments can provide useful information in assessing damage in real time and help direct recovery efforts. The search process for the analyst could be made much more efficient and productive if a tool could go beyond a typical search engine and provide not just links to web sites but actual links to specific data relevant to the natural disaster, parse unstructured reports for useful information nuggets, as well as gather other related reports, summaries, news stories, and images. This presentation will describe a semantic aggregation tool developed to address similar problem for Earth Science researchers. This tool provides automated curation, and creates "Data Albums" to support case studies. The generated "Data Albums" are compiled collections of information related to a specific science topic or event, containing links to relevant data files (granules) from different instruments; tools and services for visualization and analysis; information about the event contained in news reports, and images or videos to supplement research analysis. An ontology-based relevancy-ranking algorithm drives the curation of relevant data sets for a given event. This tool is now being used to generate a catalog of Hurricane Case Studies at Global Hydrology Resource Center (GHRC), one of NASA's Distribute Active Archive Centers. Another instance of the Data Albums tool is currently being created in collaboration with NASA/MSFC's SPoRT Center, which conducts research on unique NASA products and capabilities that can be transitioned to the operational community to solve forecast problems. This new instance focuses on severe weather to support SPoRT researchers in their model evaluation studies
Ramachandran, Rahul↗
Initial Exploration of STEReO (Scalable Traffic management for Emergency Response Operations) system user requirements for safe integration of small UAS
Environment-based disasters, such as wildfire, can cause substantial loss of life and loss of property and are costing billions of dollars annually. Existing disaster response operations are complex, with many challenges. The aim of the Scalable Traffic management for Emergency Response Operations (STEReO) system is to demonstrate the application of technologies that will enable small, low-altitude Unmanned Aerial System operations to safely take place in the airspace above a disaster event, increasing the effectiveness of the response. As a first step, the project aims to build a small prototype to demonstrate and test the core functions of this system based on user needs and requirements that were gathered from experts in the field during discussions and walkthroughs.
STEReO↗
Use of VIIRS DNB Data to Monitor Power Outages and Restoration for Significant Weather Events
NASA fs Short-term Prediction Research and Transition (SPoRT) project operates from NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. The team provides unique satellite data to the National Weather Service (NWS) and other agencies and organizations for weather analysis. While much of its work is focused on improving short-term weather forecasting, the SPoRT team supported damage assessment and response to Hurricane Superstorm Sandy by providing imagery that highlighted regions without power. The team used data from the Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) on the Suomi National Polar-orbiting Partnership (Suomi NPP) satellite. The VIIRS low-light sensor, known as the day-night-band (DNB), can detect nighttime light from wildfires, urban and rural communities, and other human activity which emits light. It can also detect moonlight reflected from clouds and surface features. Using real time VIIRS data collected by our collaborative partner at the Space Science and Engineering Center of the University of Wisconsin, the SPoRT team created composite imagery to help detect power outages and restoration. This blackout imagery allowed emergency response teams from a variety of agencies to better plan and marshal resources for recovery efforts. The blackout product identified large-scale outages, offering a comprehensive perspective beyond a patchwork GIS mapping of outages that utility companies provide based on customer complaints. To support the relief efforts, the team provided its imagery to the USGS data portal, which the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and other agencies used in their relief efforts. The team fs product helped FEMA, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, and U.S. Army monitor regions without power as part of their disaster response activities. Disaster responders used the images to identify possible outages and effectively distribute relief resources. An enhanced product is being developed and integrated into a web mapping service (WMS) for dissemination and use by a broader end user community.
Jedlovec, Gary↗
Collaborative, Rapid Mapping of Water Extents During Hurricane Harvey Using Optical and Radar Satellite Sensors
On August 25, 2017, Hurricane Harvey made landfall between Port Aransas and Port O'Connor, Texas, bringing with it unprecedented amounts of rainfall and record flooding. In times of natural disasters of this nature, emergency responders require timely and accurate information about the hazard in order to assess and plan for disaster response. Due to the extreme flooding impacts associated with Hurricane Harvey, delineations of water extent were crucial to inform resource deployment. Through the USGS's Hazards Data Distribution System, government and commercial vendors were able to acquire and distribute various satellite imagery to analysts to create value-added products that can be used by these emergency responders. Rapid-response water extent maps were created through a collaborative multi-organization and multi-sensor approach. One team of researchers created Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) water extent maps using modified Copernicus Sentinel data (2017), processed by ESA. This group used backscatter images, pre-processed by the Alaska Satellite Facility's Hybrid Pluggable Processing Pipeline (HyP3), to identify and apply a threshold to identify water in the image. Quality control was conducted by manually examining the image and correcting for potential errors. Another group of researchers and graduate student volunteers derived water masks from high resolution DigitalGlobe and SPOT images. Through a system of standardized image processing, quality control measures, and communication channels the team provided timely and fairly accurate water extent maps to support a larger NASA Disasters Program response. The optical imagery was processed through a combination of various band thresholds and by using Normalized Difference Water Index (NDWI), Modified Normalized Water Index (MNDWI), Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI), and cloud masking. Several aspects of the pre-processing and image access were run on internal servers to expedite the provision of images to analysts who could focus on manipulating thresholds and quality control checks for maximum accuracy within the time constraints. The combined results of the radar- and optical-derived value-added products through the coordination of multiple organizations provided timely information for emergency response and recovery efforts.
SERVIR↗
Flight Test Exploration of Integrated Wildfire Response Operations with Crewed and Uncrewed Air Assets
Since 2016, JAXA and NASA have partnered to investigate the safe and efficient integration of unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) in disaster response operations. Through the collaboration, supporting systems from the respective agencies have been successfully integrated and demonstrated in multiple activities ranging from localized simulations and flight tests to large-scale national disaster drills. This paper describes findings from the most recent flight test by JAXA using a crewed helicopter conducting wildfire response operations in proximity to an area in which simulated small UAS, supported by UTM services, were conducting prescribed burn operations.
disaster response↗
International disaster research
No existing telecommunications system can be expected to provide strategy and tactics appropriate to the complex, many faceted problem of disaster. Despite the exciting capabilities of space, communications, remote sensing, and the miracles of modern medicine, complete turnkey transfers to the disaster problem do not make the fit, and cannot be expected to do so. In 1980, a Presidential team assigned the mission of exploring disaster response within the U.S. Federal Government encountered an unanticipated obstacle: disaster was essentially undefined. In the absence of a scientifically based paradigm of disaster, there can be no measure of cost effectiveness, optimum design of manpower structure, or precise application of any technology. These problems spawned a 10-year, multidisciplinary study designed to define the origins, anatomy, and necessary management techniques for catastrophes. The design of the study necessarily reflects interests and expertise in disaster medicine, emergency medicine, telecommunications, computer communications, and forencsic sciences. This study is described.
Silverstein, Martin Elliot↗
Aircraft Classification Using Radar from Small Unmanned Aerial Systems for Scalable Traffic Management Emergency Response Operations
This work investigates two machine learning techniques: Support Vector Machine (SVM) and Autoencoders (AE)with SVM layer for classification of radar trajectories as General Aviation (GA), fixed-wing small Unmanned Aerial System (sUAS), or not-an-aircraft using radar data recorded from sUAS. Onboard identification of intruder aircraft type is useful for planning avoidance maneuvers and is necessary to provide autonomous systems to meet or exceed the avoidance capability of a human pilot. Aircraft classification can identify intruder aircraft that are not part of the team and may be violating a Temporary Flight Restriction. Aircraft classification is needed in monitoring an airspace where multiple aircraft are teaming on a shared task. Scalable Traffic Management for Emergency Response Operations (STEReO) is a NASA project aimed at improving disaster response by enabling large scale aircraft operations through the teaming of manned aircraft with sUAS to maximize emergency response resources. To this end, this work uses trajectories and radar derived features to classify aircraft from a multirotor sUAS. The AE + SVM generated the strongest classification overall accuracy of 93.5% using the first 4 seconds of radar track data for tracks that activated the avoidance system. Subsampling the available track data increased the available training data with the maximum aircraft recall of 0.94 achieved using the SVM with 1 second track data.
Chester V. Dolph↗
Wildfire monitoring using Unmanned Aerial Vehicles operating under UTM (STEReO)
STEReO (Scalable Traffic Management for Emergency Response Operations) project at NASA Ames is designed to provide UTM (UAS Traffic Management) services to unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) used for natural disaster response scenarios like wildfire and hurricanes. This will facilitate the use of unmanned aerial vehicles in regions where UAVs are currently prohibited to fly. In this paper we describe a complete architecture of using UAVs for wild fire monitoring in this STEReO environment. We simulate a complete fire monitoring scenario in an high fidelity simulation environment. The simulation consists of a fire drill in the vicinity of Redding airport, one of the test sites for CAL-FIRE. The autonomous vehicle connects to the STEReO systems and gathers information of other operation in the vicinity. The vehicle then uses on-board path planners and decision making algorithms for fire monitoring and mapping. In this paper the vehicle on-board architecture is described in details and the requirements to fly and interact with the STEReO system is discussed.
UAV UTM↗
Satellite communications for disaster relief operations
The use of communication satellite systems to provide assistance in disaster relief operations on a global basis is presented. Disaster problem phases such as detection, warning, and relief; requirements for the communication capability including remote data collection, imaging and voice broadcast; and the global disaster network are discussed. Utilization of Intelsat and Marisat systems and the size and type of ground terminals required for satellite access is considered, and estimates of communication requirements for a global system and of costs for satellite services to support relief operations are given. NASA disaster related activities including studies of direct-to-home disaster warning and determination of disaster response times are described, and it is concluded that existing international satellite communication systems offer real potential for the establishment of a reliable and flexible network devoted to disaster related communication services.
Sivo, J. N.↗
International Telemedicine/Disaster Medicine Conference: Papers and Presentations
The first International Telemedicine/Disaster Medicine Conference was held in Dec. 1991. The overall purpose was to convene an international, multidisciplinary gathering of experts to discuss the emerging field of telemedicine and assess its future directions; principally the application of space technology to disaster response and management, but also to clinical medicine, remote health care, public health, and other needs. This collection is intended to acquaint the reader with recent landmark efforts in telemedicine as applied to disaster management and remote health care, the technical requirements of telemedicine systems, the application of telemedicine and telehealth in the U.S. space program, and the social and humanitarian dimensions of this area of medicine.
Source record↗
Laser Prevention of Earth Impact Disasters
Today we are seeing the geological data base constantly expanding as new evidence from past impacts with the Earth are discovered and investigated. It is now commonly believed that a hypervelocity impact occurring approximately 65 million years ago in the Yucatan Peninsula area was the disaster responsible for the extinction of almost 70% of the species of life on Earth including of course the dinosaurs. What is sobering is that we believe now that this was just one of several such disasters and that some of the others caused extinctions to even a greater extent. Preventing collisions with the Earth by hypervelocity asteroids, meteoroids, and comets is the most important problem facing human civilization. While there are many global problems facing our planet including overpopulation, pollution, disease, and deforestation; none of these offer the potential of rapid, total extinction. Rapid is the operative word here in that many of the global problems we face may indeed, if not sufficiently addressed, pose a similar long-term threat. However, with the impact threat, a single, almost unpredictable event could lead to a chain reaction of disasters that would end everything mankind has worked to achieve over the centuries. Our chances of being hit are greater than our chance of winning the lottery. We now believe that while there are only about 2000-earth orbit crossing rocks great than 1 kilometer in diameter, there may be as many as 100,000 rocks in the 100 m size range. The 1 kilometer rocks are difficult to detect and even harder to track. The 100 m class ones are almost impossible to find with today's technology. Can anything be done about this fundamental existence question facing us? The answer is a resounding yes. By using an intelligent combination of Earth and space based sensors coupled with high-energy laser stations in orbit, we can deflect rocks from striking the Earth. This is accomplished by irradiating the surface of the rock with sufficiently intense pulses so that ablation occurs. This ablation acts as a small rocket incrementally changing the shape of the rock's orbit around the Sun.
Campbell, Jonathan W.↗