From Pixels to Population Stress: Global Multispectral Remote Sensing for Vulnerable Communities
Abstract
The Arizona State University (ASU) School of Earth and Space Exploration's Mars Space Flight Facility (MSFF) and 100 Cities Project, in collaboration with the United Nations Global Pulse initiative are utilizing NASA multispectral satellite data to visualize and analyze socioeconomic characteristics and human activity in Uganda. The Global Pulse initiative is exploring how new kinds of real-time data and innovative technologies can be leveraged to detect early social impacts of slow-onset crisis and global shocks. Global Pulse is developing a framework for real-time monitoring, assembling an open-source toolkit for analyzing new kinds of data and establishing a global network of country-level "Pulse Labs" where governments, UN agencies, academia and the private sector learn together how to harness the new world of "big data" to protect the vulnerable with targeted and agile policy responses. The ASU MSFF and 100 Cities Project are coordinating with the Global Pulse team to utilize NASA remote sensing data in this effort. Human behavior and socioeconomic parameters have been successfully studied via proxy through remote sensing of the physical environment by measuring the growth of city boundaries and transportation networks, crop health, soil moisture, and slum development from visible and infrared imagery. The NASA/ NOAA image of Earth's "Lights at Night" is routinely used to estimate economic development and population density. There are many examples of the conventional uses of remote sensing in humanitarian-related projects including the Famine Early Warning System Network (FEWS NET) and the UN's operational satellite applications programme (UNOSAT), which provides remote sensing for humanitarian and disaster relief. Since the Global Pulse project is focusing on new, innovative uses of technology for early crisis detection, we are focusing on three non-conventional uses of satellite remote sensing to understand what role NASA multispectral satellites can play in monitoring underlying socioeconomic and human parameters. These are: 1) measuring and visualizing changes in agriculture and fertilizer use in Ugandan villages in order to assist policymakers in designing land use policies and evaluating the impact of fertilizer use on smallholder farmers in developing countries; 2) monitoring the size and composition of large scale rubbish dumps to determine correlation with changes in policy and economic growth; 3) measuring the size and shape of open air markets, or proxies related to the markets, to determine if changes can be detected that correspond to fluctuations in economic activity. The ASU MSFF open source geographical information systems (GIS) platform, J-Earth, will be used to provide easy access to and analytical tools for the data and imagery resulting from this project. J-Earth is a part of the Java Mission-planning and Analysis for Remote Sensing (JMARS) suite of software first developed for targeting NASA instruments on planetary missions.
- Publication:
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AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2011
- Bibcode:
- 2011AGUFMIN11A1268P
- Keywords:
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- 1910 INFORMATICS / Data assimilation;
- integration and fusion