Taiwan remote sensing satellite, Formosat-2, aid rescue of wild fire of South California:
As soon as acknowledging the urgency of the wild fire of San Diego, NSPO voluntarily and immediately started to program Formosat-2 satellite to acquire images over the disaster area of South California. Since 23 October 2007, NSPO has successfully acquired daily series of high-resolution images. The 1st set of images clearly revealed the areas under the raging of the fire and also the aftermath. Thanks to NTNU IADC (Image Analysis Distribution Center) , their reactivity shorten the time of the delivery of the image, which maximize the value of the data for urgent needs. The cooperation between NTNU, SDSU and NSPO demonstrate an efficient support scheme to use FORMOSAT-2 remote sensing data in an urgent disaster event. It also again prove that FORMOSAT-2 is the best practice for any urgent event which need instantly the information of the area.
These images have also been analyzed by local research agencies and then distributed to the corresponding agencies, NCKU, provided the analysis result to the NASA earth observatory website.
The wild fire has now forced over 880,000 people retreated from their home, and the estimated umber of the loss of the property is getting close to 1 billion USD. Thanks to the support of FORMOSAT-2 near real time data, it helped the local administration to have most updated information about the area affected by the wildfire. SDSU has shown their sincere gratitude to NSPO for the support of the Formosat-2 images. Formosat-2 was the 1st high resolution commercial remote sensing satellite used to support this emergency.
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