Space-based facilities for environmental disaster monitoring, assessment and management

Environmental Disaster Monitoring and Impact Assessment as well as Management (EDMIAM) are concerned with: "handling" of disasters (Floods /Hurricanes/Fires etc) through data collection by sensors, timeliness delivery to processing centers and dissemination for situation awareness and managing the counter actions. Some of the meant environmental services are: flood mapping and monitoring, forest fire mapping and early warning, forest & agricultural disease mapping, oil spill monitoring, estimation of long-term land degradation as well as disaster management & mitigation. This paper is dedicated to clarifying the role of "space" in the domain of data collection process (covering the spatial and temporal sampling) as well as impact assessment (through processing, visualizing, correlating, interpreting, predicting etc.) and disseminating information and management actions. Due to the wide extent of the environmental phenomena, coordinated efforts and worldwide organizations and networks incorporating satellites are "essential" in such application. Hence, an overview of the necessary infrastructure (whether or not implemented) is given along with a call for filling the gaps and "harmonizing" the present facilities through interface improvements and means of bridging differences in various systems front ends (frequencies, modulations and formats).