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International Archives of the Photogrammetry, Remote Sensing and Spatial Information Sciences, Vol XXXV, Part B7. Istanbul 2004
international aid to member countries. In addition since July
2003, the UN Office of Outer Space Affairs (UN OOSA) has
become a co-operative body to the Charter, allowing also the
UN organizations to activate the Charter.
The process is triggered by the call of an Authorized User to a
24-hour On-Duty Operator (ODO) who is located at
ESA/ESRIN in Italy. This operator checks the identity of the
requester, verifies that the User Request Form sent by the user,
is correctly filled up (preliminary information on type, location
and scope of the disaster); then, he forwards this information,
within the hour, to the Emergency On-Call Officer (ECO). This
officer is an engineer on the staff of one of the Charter
members, which share the task in turn, week by week.
The next step for the Emergency On-Call Officer is (1) to
analyse the request and the scope of the disaster with the user,
(2) to identify the most quickly available and appropriate
satellite resources, and (3) to inform the requester of the
contemplated action plan for rapid acquisition of satellite
imagery of the disaster zone. This request of satellite tasking
and archive retrieval is sent to partner satellite operators to
obtain immediate action. By this time the activation procedure
is up and running. The Emergency On-Call Officer hands over
to a Project Manager (PM), appointed by the partners, who
supervises the process through to its conclusion, namely rapid
delivery of the relevant documents (archive imagery, land use
map, change detection leading to possible damage
identification, etc.) to the end-user.
The Charter operation loop is described hereafter:
Emergency
on-Call Officer
rr? (ECO) Ss CSA 7
ens : M
ARN :
(2) N ESA. =
On-Duty €
Operator (ODO) CNES —
Ya NOAA —
v ZEN 1sRO
‘Project joa CONAE —
Authorized ! ^» Manager
User (AU) a AUS (PM)
Dew N E Le E
Disaster a
wi m
Value-Added
Reseller (VAR)
Since its implementation, the Charter has been activated 52
times in 42 months (as of May 15, 2004) on almost all the
continents and for various kinds of events such as landslide,
earthquake, oil spill, flood, volcanic eruption, forest fires.
Fourteen different organisations from Argentina, Austria,
Belgium, Canada, European Union, France, Germany, India,
Italy, Portugal, Switzerland, UK, United Nations and the USA
were involved. Each operation was analysed with the relevant
end-users and the Project Manager in order to improve the
efficiency of the service provided to the civil protection
community particularly in terms of response time and of
delivered products. Some of the best cases of Charter activation
leading to change detection imagery and to some tentative of
593
damage assessment products in close co-ordination with the end
users are described hereafter.
2. SOME CHARTER ACTIVITIES
2.1 Earthquakes
A major earthquake struck Algeria in May 2003, the French
Civil Protection Authority (CPA) initiated the Charter at the
request of the Algerian CPA. The only useful satellite
information were Spot 4 (May 23) and Spot 5 (May 27).
Spot 4 imagery could not be successfully compared with Spot 5
available archive due to viewing angle differences, although the
products were available 40 hours after activation. However the
good accuracy of the Spot 5 (2.5 m) archive was useful, as no
local maps at that scale were available.
The new Spot 5 acquisition and the resulting value-added
products were delivered on May 28 and were finally
appreciated by the Algerian CPA and the central government.
They were integrated in the local GIS with other existing data
and provided a good overview of the situation with clear
identification of the refugees’ camps.
Reference image
E
"Building" changes
C?
Structural anomalies
à
cnes
AHNGT AAT 18 TE
©
After the earthquake
Another major earthquake in Iran (city of Bam), December
26, 2003, killed over 35,000 inhabitants according to UN
information leaving several hundred thousands homeless.
Both the German and French CPAs activated the Charter.
A number of products were delivered by the French value
added company SERTIT (under an arrangement with ESA), as
of December 29 using a number of data sources: Spot 4, IRS
and Ikonos for crisis images acquired December 27 and 29 and
IRS and Spot 5 images for reference acquired before the
earthquake. Although not a party to the Charter, Space Imaging
in co-operation with the German Aerospace Centre (DLR) have
