News Contributing to the EO and emergency services legacy

Applicants can use EO data from any source to develop their solution. Successful applicants will be eligible for training and support from Geoscience Australia to use their EO data platform, Digital Earth Australia.

Applicants are encouraged to develop a solution for any NT industry, using any combination of data, provided some of that data is EO-derived.

However, if you are looking to solve an existing problem rather than search for new ones, DITT is working with the Territory’s emergency services to identify existing challenges that could be addressed using EO-derived solutions.

DITT’s Acting Director of Industry Strategy, Narayan Buckley, said while applicants have free reign to develop any EO solution they desired, finding fixes for Bushfires NT, and NT Police, Fire & Emergency Services would also free up those services’ precious time and resources.

“Solutions that improve emergency services’ ability to plan responses to events such as fire or flood will improve response times and enhance support services to the community,” Narayan said.

“While those that automate existing manual processes would free up work units to focus on providing a more tailored response to support communities.”

EO has a long history of supporting emergency services. One of the first tasks the US Geological Survey Landsat1 mission undertook when it was launched in 1972 was observing a forest fire in a remote part of Alaska.

“For the first time ever, scientists and resource management officials were able to see the full extent of damage from a fire in a single image while it was still burning,” USGS states about the early EO milestone.

Recently, when Australia’s east coast was inundated with flooding for the third time this year, the NSW Government requested activation of the European Union’s Copernicus Emergency Management System (CEMS), a service that uses satellite imagery and other geospatial data to assist emergency responders the world over.

Michael Hope, Geoscience Australia’s Project Manager for the Copernicus Australasia Regional Data Hub, said CEMS helps to map out the impact and extent of emergency situations at the neighbourhood and suburb scale.

“The CEMS Rapid Mapping service delivers regular updated products giving local emergency agencies the big picture on the ground, over the entirety of the event,” Michael said.

The visibility of disaster events can often be hampered by cloud cover, in the case of flooding, or bushfire smoke. To counter this obfuscation, techniques are employed using observation systems beyond the visual, including synthetic aperture radar and infrared detection to penetrate cloud and smoke.

An existing DEA product that assists emergency response management using infrared EO is DEA Hotspots. This near-real-time national monitoring system uses sensors to detect areas producing high levels of infrared radiation, or “hotspots”.

DEA Hotspots uses a colour scale to identify potential fire locations, which helps emergency managers to coordinate responses to impending threats to communities and property.

In a recent interview with Spatial Source, Maggie Arnold, who was responsible for GA’s mission critical applications, said DEA Hotspots had already proved its mettle during the devastating 2019-2020 bushfires.

“During the Black Summer bushfires, DEA Hotspots was used by emergency managers to help identify and monitor potential fire locations that posed a possible risk to communities, properties and electrical infrastructure,” Maggie said.

“With the addition of [Japan’s weather satellite] Himawari-8 Hotspots we can now detect potential new bushfires within 17 minutes of the satellite overpass. Since the Himawari-8 satellite is geostationary, it’s continuously collecting data every 10 minutes over the same area.”