On a daily basis new housing, new roads, buildings and infrastructures appear in many regions across Europe. The cartographic material which represents the actual situation is outdated and is only updated every 5 or 10 years. Especially for regions with a lot of new developments and changes, for example cities in Central Europe, the existing printed maps are not updated frequently and can’t catch up with the changes on the terrain. When a natural disaster takes place, the consequences are obvious: new developments are not integrated in the geo-data used for risk management and so they are not taken into account by the rescue teams or crisis managers. This can have disastrous consequences when acting in a crisis-situation.
The service “Monitoring of elements at risk” of EUROSENSE makes it possible to frequently provide several end-users with up-to-date maps. These end-users are civil protection agencies, water management authorities and rescue organisations. The maps contain urban areas, as well as isolated buildings, industrial/ commercial/public buildings and infrastructures and/or all their changes in a fixed period of time, depending on the product.
Based on optical satellite images, several geo-data products can be produced by using a semi-automatic classification process. The overall focus of the service is to locate and to identify all civilian elements contained by areas prone to risk of natural disasters, e.g. recent or predicted flooded areas. Besides for risk mapping, these products are also very useful for urban and regional planning purposes and users.
The benefits of this service are the rapid way of updating old cartographic data for a large coverage and the possibilities of doing this on a yearly or 2-yearly basis, depending on the users’ needs. This EUROSENSE’ service is continuously improved in close cooperation with the several end-users. In that way this multi-risk service can be adapted to the specific user needs and the results can be integrated in the existing database or system.
Fig. 1 and Fig. 2. represent Bratislava and its surroundings lying very closely to the Danube River. A great part of the city is situated approximately 4 to 5 meters below the Danube level. In Fig. 1 and Fig. 2.C the new buildings (appeared between 2005 and 2006) are presented in red in a 3D-perspective. In Fig. 2.A you can see the situation in 2005. Fig. 2.B represents the architectural plan of a building in 2005 in light blue.
The services mentioned above performed by Eurosense were awarded by Definiens for the “GMES Innovation Award 2007”.
Past Flood Mapping
Information by Past Flood Mapping is vital for prevention and planning of construction dams and infrastructures. These maps can also be used to have an archive of past flood events and to learn from similar events; the risk history.
It can also be used for damage assessment and reports to better support flood risk assessment and can be seen as an important input for environmental and town planning issues.
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Flood simulation
The Flood Simulation service of EUROSENSE provides important information for the planning of new (or improvement of) flood related infrastructures, like dams. By generating information like flooded areas, water depth, flowing velocity and flow direction, this service is a fundamental information/decision source in preventing future disasters, by indicating possible difficulties/weaknesses during certain scenarios. The simulation/modeling of floods provides essential information (potential flood extents & potential economic losses in case of major events or dam failures) for flood risk preparedness & environmental planning.
Damage assessment
Everybody knows that disasters, like floods, have a huge impact on society (casualties, destroyed houses, agricultural and economical losses, etc.). However, what is the effective cost of this damage? The service offered by EUROSENSE gives an indication of this cost, based on different kind of available data (like satellite/aerial imagery during the flood, damage extent maps, flood simulations, statistical data & land use maps). This estimation of the damage provides this way important information for socio-economic impact assessment of flood events and supports decision making for insurance companies and environmental and planning agencies.
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