ONE MORE MILESTONE: Indian Space Research Organisation Chairman G. Madhavan Nair greeting delegates at the fifth anniversary of the International Charter on `Space and Major Disasters' in Bangalore on Tuesday. — Photo: K. Murali Kumar

BANGALORE: To issue advance warning for timely evacuation and rehabilitation, the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) will make available within a year Geographical Information System (GIS) data on the districts highly vulnerable to floods, ISRO chairman G. Madhavan Nair said here on Tuesday.

Addressing the fifth anniversary celebrations of the International Charter on Space and Major Disasters here, he said that about 150 districts in the country are susceptible to floods and that ISRO and other agencies are in the process of collecting GIS data on these areas for the last two years.

The International Charter on Space and Major Disasters has completed five years of its operation and so far it has been activated 87 times to provide value added earth satellite data various countries to help population exposed to risk or affected by a natural or technological disaster.

Space information

Besides the devastating tsunami that struck the southeast Asian and south Asian countries in December last year, the Charter also enabled intervention by providing space information in the Hurricane Katrina activation. The two-day conference aimed to establish future direction for the charter.

Dr. Nair stressed the need to establishing strong communication links such as hot terminals as a vital means of disaster management. "Disaster management cannot stand out with imaging alone," he said.

Lamenting that commercial interests dominated the disaster management scene, Dr. Nair said ISRO, along with some other agencies, is in the process of establishing a nationwide Disaster Management Support System, complete with a combination of real time satellite imagery data and ground-based information, to give advance warning on disasters.

The system, he said, is a convergence of space communications and remote sensing capabilities, and therefore, an effort to establish the dynamic equilibrium among the user needs, national capability and space system.

He said ISRO is interested in the Global Earth Observation System of Systems (GEOSS) and will take an active part in the evolution of the Disaster Management International Space Coordination Organisation (DMISCO).

Repeativity of satellite imagery is the issue here. While currently, satellites can revisit an area every 30 hours, it could be reduced to six hours. "That should be the collective target of the different nations involved in earth observation," he said.

Looking through clouds is a limitation for the satellites, he said, adding that ISRO is configuring a Radar Imaging Satellite (RISAT) with all weather capability. This spacecraft is slated for launch onboard the PSLV during 2007.

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