Hello, and welcome to this Asia-Pacific-themed GeoSpatial Stream. I’m your host, Todd Danielson, and today’s Lead Sponsor is Trimble Geospatial Division.
Today’s Top Story is tsunami. As we approach the 10-year anniversary of the Indian Ocean tsunami that killed more than 230,000 people, there have been reports in the news that tsunami preparedness is improving.
In September of this year, a UNESCO exercise successfully demonstrated its Indian Ocean Tsunami Warning System. Twenty-four countries participated in the simulation, and all received timely advisory messages without any delays.
On October 1st, the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center replaced its previous warning and watch services with enhanced tsunami information that will improve countries’ response capability and help provide advanced notice of potential local tsunamis while reducing the numbers of areas warned unnecessarily.
In addition, a new tsunami warning system, created by RegPoint and based in Hyderabad, India, has been scheduled for launch in early 2015. The service will send SMS messages to all mobile phones in a designated locality, pinpointing precise warnings, guidance or other information to a specific geographical region before a disaster strikes.
That was today’s Top Story. I’ll be back with more news after this brief message.
NASA Administrator Charles Bolden and K. Radhakrishnan, chairman of the Indian Space Research Organisation, signed two documents to launch a NASA-ISRO satellite mission to observe Earth and establish a pathway for future joint missions to explore Mars. They also signed an international agreement that defines how the agencies will work together on the NASA-ISRO Synthetic Aperture Radar mission targeted to launch in 2020.
China released the first images from its Gaofen-2 one-meter-resolution, multispectral remote-sensing satellite, which was launched in August of this year.
And here’s a clip from a video describing The Global Sensor Network, which is being developed by the Institute for Telecommunications Research at the University of South Australia:
In industry headlines, MDA’s Information Systems group renewed its contract with Thailand’s Geo-Informatics & Space Technology Development Agency to continue use of RADARSAT-2 data to support critical infrastructure serving Thailand’s resource-management and disaster-mitigation applications.
Esri introduced a new Story Map outlining the expansion of the U.S. Pacific Remote Islands Marine National Monument to 490,000 square miles.
China’s Xiaomi plans to buy a $13 million dollar stake in GPS mapping company Careland.
And Innovyze named Nobel Systems as a smart water-modeling channel partner for The Philippines.
And now for today’s Final Thought:
Where I live, tsunami is mostly a strange-sounding word that causes a lot of destruction far, far away. But if you live in the Asia-Pacific region, it’s much more real and deadly. Unfortunately, we can’t prevent tsunamis. But we can create better warning systems and build smarter, better infrastructure that can survive, and help people survive, such calamities.
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I’m Todd Danielson, and this … was your GeoSpatial Stream.
