Remote Sensing:
Earth-Observation Summit Endorses Global Data Sharing
Richard Stone BEIJING—Last August, heavy monsoon rains submerged nearly
one-fifth of Pakistan, inflicting $43 billion worth of damage.
The floodwaters destroyed homes and businesses, washed away
bridges and roads, ruined crops, and claimed about 1800 lives.
As bad as it was, the toll could have grown in the weeks that
followed if not for a novel Earth-observation system featured
at a meeting here last week.
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Waterlogged. This SERVIR-Himalaya analysis shows flooding along the Indus River in Pakistan's Sindh Province last August. CREDIT: ICIMOD, NASA
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In July, before the deluge, the International Centre for Integrated
Mountain Development in Kathmandu—along with NASA and
the U.S. Agency for International Development—had booted
up SERVIR-Himalaya, a Web-based monitoring system that pulls
together satellite imagery, forecast models, and ground observations.
It "showed the progression of the floods in [near] real time,"
says Sherburne Abbott, associate director for environment at
the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. As
the disaster unfolded, analyses revealed that flooding had knocked
nearly 200 tuberculosis clinics out of commission. Forewarned,
aid agencies scrambled to steer patients to functioning health
centers. "They knew they were going to have a real problem,"
Abbott says.
SERVIR is one new instrument in a veritable orchestra of Earth-observation
systems intended to make reams of data available and relevant
to decision-makers. At the summit last week of the Group on
Earth Observations (GEO)—the organization attempting to
get this ensemble performing in synchrony—initiatives
were unveiled to monitor land-cover changes and forest carbon
stocks. And GEO delegates embraced plans to funnel data from
platforms tracking everything from biodiversity to earthquake
risks into a free and open database. "What's happening is groundbreaking,"
says David Hayes, deputy secretary of the U.S. Department of
the Interior. "This data is incredibly valuable. If you share
it, your incremental contribution can yield a super benefit."
Established in 2005, GEO is an effort by 85 countries, the European
Commission, and 58 international organizations to meld disparate
remote-sensing tools and ground-based databases—300 databases
and counting—into a seamless Global Earth Observation
System of Systems (GEOSS), which is expected to come fully online
in 2015. When GEO was conceived, "we understood that if you
want to manage planetary problems, you have to have planetary
information—which didn't exist at that stage," says Bob
Scholes, a biodiversity expert at the Council for Scientific
and Industrial Research in Pretoria.
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Data fundamentals. Of 146 critical Earth observations, GEO rates these 10 as the highest priority. CREDIT: (SOURCE) GEO
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GEO's progress has been remarkably swift, Scholes adds, and
the project has overcome the view that data should be hoarded,
not shared. "When an earlier generation of scientists collected
data on the public purse, they considered it their data. The
norm now is that data will quickly enter the public domain,"
he says. To reinforce such good behavior, "persistent identifier"
tags are being developed that will note which scientists or
teams contributed data to GEOSS. The U.S. Office of Management
and Budget (OMB) is spurring agencies to release data via
www.data.gov.
"OMB is looking to measure our department's productivity in
part by how much we're adding to the public's access to data,"
says Hayes.
NASA and the U.S. Geological Survey 2 years ago began allowing
free access to their 4-decade Landsat archive, including images
with a resolution of 30 meters that enable tracking of land-cover
changes wrought by human activity. And riding new open-data
legislation in the European Union, the European Space Agency
plans to allow free access to data streams from its soon-to-be-launched
Sentinel satellites, says Manuela Soares, director for environmental
research at the European Commission's Research Directorate.
"There's been delivery of data on a massive scale," says Gary
Richards of Australia's Department of Climate Change and Energy
Efficiency in Canberra.
Ground-truthing such data is a key element of Silva Carbon,
a U.S.-led scientific network announced here to help GEO improve
access to Earth-observation data on forests. SilvaCarbon is
expected to develop technologies to implement one of the few
bright spots in international climate negotiations: REDD+, a
program to reduce emissions from deforestation and enhance forest
carbon stocks. Together with GEO's Global Forest Observation
Initiative, SilvaCarbon "shows that we are ready to take the
next big step to a robust and transparent global monitoring
system for forest carbon," says Richards.
A second new effort, the Global Land-Cover Data Initiative,
aims over the next 2 years to compile and publicly share a current
snapshot of Earth's land-cover conditions. Landsat data provide
80% coverage; GEO partners will fork over the rest.
As GEOSS is woven from disparate data sets, there have been
a few glitches in integrating the information. "We can't get
all data into the free and open database at this point," says
Abbott. And some resistance remains. "We still get pushback,"
says Scholes. "Some countries worry about how data release will
affect national security." Nations fret, for instance, over
satellite data they have no control over and others revealing
info such as flows rates of transboundary rivers. Of course,
all agree that some sensitive data, such as the precise location
of the last few individuals of an endangered species, should
not enter the public domain. "But these instances are now perceived
as the exceptions to the rule," Scholes says. And that, he says,
testifies to the profound cultural change on data sharing that
GEO is helping drive.
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