The NASA and Rio de Janeiro Partnership: Connecting the use of Earth observation to the city scale to inform management and monitoring of environmental issues

In December 2015, NASA and the City of Rio de Janeiro signed an agreement to support innovative efforts to better understand, anticipate, and monitor hazards and environmental issues, including heavy rainfall and landslides, urban flooding, air quality and water quality in and around the city. This collaboration leverages the unique attributes of NASA's satellite data and modeling frameworks and Rio de Janeiro's management and monitoring capabilities to improve awareness of how the city of Rio may be impacted by hazards and affected by climate change. The partnership has made noteworthy strides in sharing data, models and information to implement new systems and capabilities at the city level in order to provide actionable information for city management and planning. Specifically, Rio de Janeiro is now running a landslide model developed by NASA within the city operationally (LHASA-Rio). The city localized NASA's global model to provide real-time estimates of potential landslide activity at high resolution. This work is being extended to consider the rainfall forecast and improve characterization of landslide exposure and risk. Other efforts have focused on applying satellite data for water quality monitoring and enhancing a global air quality model with local observations from the city. The partnership has also hosted several engagement events with local educators to provide content in Portuguese on how Earth observations are relevant to their city. This presentation will highlight some of the achievements of this partnership, lessons learned in engaging the teams, and advancing decision-relevant science at the city level.