An evaluation of potential natural disaster response using the National Polar-orbiting Operational Environmental Satellite System (NPOESS)

Abstract

As the 21 <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">st</sup> century begins, the number of natural disasters effecting populated areas has seen a dramatic increase. The cause of this increase can be attributed to a variety of factors including global climatic change, an increase in global population, and a related increase in the use of lands more vulnerable to natural disaster events. Timely monitoring and warning of natural disaster events is critical to our ability to respond to and recover from these disasters. The National Polar-orbiting Operational Environmental Satellite System (NPOESS) is the next generation of environmental satellites to study the Earth and its climate. It will provide a significant increase in the ability to monitor and respond to disaster events by increasing temporal resolution and decreasing the timeline required for information to be accessible to ground stations. This paper will present an introduction to NPOESS and discuss its potential utility in natural disaster monitoring and response efforts in combination with state of the art data mining techniques. NPOESS is a constellation of low orbiting polar satellites capable of achieving near global coverage and is supplemented with a next generation METSAT capability. Its primary mission is the observation of Earth's land, ocean, and atmosphere, including the troposphere, stratosphere and the near space boundary. This system, due to come online in approximately 2013, will replace the United States' current constellation of environmental and weather satellites. NPOESS will revolutionize the way remote sensing is used in natural hazard monitoring and response efforts. It will allow simultaneous or near-simultaneous collection of atmospheric phenomena by multiple sensors. This capability will increase our understanding of atmospheric phenomena by reducing time between collections of data from multiple sensors and by providing a common platform for data distribution and analysis. The new sensor types flown in NPOESS will also increase our collection capabilities. Increased data collection capability allows for advanced analysis of the atmosphere and will lead to better forecasting of natural hazard formation, development, and evolution. These increases in technical capability and bandwidth provide significantly more data for data mining algorithms. These algorithms have the ability to quickly interpret remotely sensed data and provide timely products to the natural disaster response community. While the NPOESS data provide a new testing ground for existing algorithms, it will also lead to the development of new algorithms driven by the need to efficiently exploit the volume of data produced by this system. The combination of new capabilities within NPOESS and the development of new advanced data mining applications will provide the disaster response community with the tools it needs to face the challenges of the new century.