 |
Toulouse, 10 July 2007 – Less than five days after the fires that raged across more than 1,000 hectares of forest in the Massif du Tanneron (Alpes-Maritimes) and the area around the town of Le Muy (Var) in Southeast France, Spot Image and Infoterra France have produced detailed maps of fire and burn scar extent using imagery acquired by the SPOT 5 satellite.
This kind of imagery is a precious aid for everyone involved in land management, from officials at the Ministry of Agriculture and its local offices to prefectures, firefighting teams and local authorities. Such rapid image acquisition is enabled by a chain of systems operated by Spot Image and Infoterra France, the two EADS Astrium subsidiaries specializing in geo-information services.
As soon as the fires had been brought under control on Thursday morning, Spot Image tasked the SPOT satellites to image the affected areas. Spot Image’s ability to task its satellites in response to any kind of emergency—in the wake of a disaster or to meet a specific customer request—is a key asset. And with three satellites currently in orbit, the SPOT system offers a daily revisit capability that ensures any point on the globe is viewed once a day by at least one of the satellites in the constellation.
Data received on 8 July at the Toulouse receiving station and pre-processed by Spot Image were sent the very next day to Infoterra France for further processing and analysis. Imagery was first corrected geometrically to register with maps before undergoing a series of specific processing steps to extract all the information required to identify fire-damaged areas. To refine analysis, the same processing was applied concurrently to pre-fire SPOT 5 imagery of the area from Spot Image’s rich archive of over 10 million scenes built up since 1986.
Within hours, Infoterra’s technicians and engineers were thus able to produce fire extent maps accurate to better than 10 metres and calculate the area burned by each fire: 426 hectares at Tanneron-Mandelieu and 613 hectares around Le Muy. These data can be combined with maps of built-up areas, campsites and so on to obtain both a broad and precise assessment of damage.
These highly automated processes rely on an industrial workflow employing software developed by Infoterra for its own research and development (geometric correction processes in particular) or for the forest fire application that is part of the RISK-EOS project co-funded by the European Space Agency (ESA). RISK-EOS is being pursued under the umbrella of the Global Monitoring for Environment and Security programme (GMES) implemented by ESA and the European Commission.
Spot Image Chairman & CEO Hervé Buchwalter and Infoterra France CEO Jean-Michel Darroy both underlined the close operational partnership their two companies demonstrated during this post-fire support effort. Rapid acquisition of imagery thanks to the flexible tasking capability of the SPOT satellites allied to high-performance processing systems get information quickly to teams working to assess fire damage and manage the post-crisis response.
About Spot Image
Spot Image is a leading supplier of geospatial information products and services. The commercial operator of the SPOT satellites, Spot Image has established numerous partnerships to offer a broad portfolio including imagery from other optical and radar satellites, at resolutions of 1 metre to 1 kilometre. Over two decades, it has successfully harnessed a range of space- and ground-based systems to meet customers' needs. Headquartered in Toulouse, France, with subsidiaries and offices in Australia, Brazil, China, Japan, Mexico, Singapore and the United States, the Spot Image group leverages a global network of ground receiving stations, partners and distributors to bring geographic information to public -and private-sector decision-makers worldwide.
About Infoterra France
Infoterra France, a wholly-owned subsidiary of EADS Astrium, specializes in the production of cartographic data and development of applications and services using Earth Observation imagery. The company delivers services to a wide range of users in various economic sectors, such as government and local authorities, defence, telecommunications, agriculture and environment, and develops dedicated cartographic solutions (map data and the RISKFRAME GIS application) for hazard and crisis management. In addition, Infoterra France is coordinating the RISK-EOS and PREVIEW projects being pursued under the GMES programme (Global Monitoring for Environment and Security) for the European Commission (EC) and the European Space Agency (ESA). Infoterra France is part of the Infoterra Group, which comprises companies with over 300 employees in France, Germany and the United Kingdom.
Contacts
Spot Image
Anne-Marie Bernard: 33 (0)5 62 19 40 10 – anne-marie.bernard@spotimage.fr
Infoterra France
Nathalie Pisot: 33 (0)4 97 23 23 46 – nathalie.pisot@infoterra-global.com |
