The NARMA-Geoland2 E-Station: An Earth Observation Based Decision Support System Tool for Real Time Environmental Monitoring in Africa

Natural Resource Monitoring in Africa (NARMA) is one of the Core Information Services of EU-FP7 project Geoland2 addressing important sectoral policies that concerns with the development of an environmental monitoring capacity over African countries for the needs of the European Commission (EC) services and for regional and continental EC partners in African countries. The overall project include the installation of more than fifty dedicated systems in the African continent for the acquisition and processing of Earth Observation data. The system is constituted by the e-Station, a computer processing chain plugged behind an EumetCast receiving station. The e-Station is developed for data management, i.e. organization and re-formatting of the data received at the station, data post processing according to NARMA procedures, data visualization (web based technology) and participatory reporting (web based technology). The whole system is developed on Open Source solutions, and entirely programmed in script language. The key objective of the system is to provide an easily maintainable and expandable solution for automated and systematic processing. The e-Station is organized in such a way that data remain accessible for other technical solutions, for instance for one-of studies, for the development and prototyping of new applications using any software, and for the feeding of external operational applications, e.g. models. The paper shows the organization of the entire system and an example application for the western Africa regions.

COMBAL Bruno;  BARTHOLOME Etienne;  BRIVIO P.A.;  BOSCHETTI Mirco;  STROPPIANA Daniela;  MARTINI Massimo; 

2010-02-16

International Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing (ISPRS), International Symposium on Geo-information for Disaster Management (Gi4DM)

JRC56146