Australia key to disaster reporting of Sentinel Asia

William Atkins
Tuesday, 05 February 2008 18:03

Science - Climate

According to Australia’s CSIRO, Sentinel Asia, a network of websites providing information on natural disasters in the Asia-Pacific region from global Earth-observing satellites, is based on Australia’s Sentinel Hotspots system, an Internet-based meteorological system.        

On February 5, 2008, CSIRO announced that its Sentinel Hotspots is a foundation to the "Sentinel Asia" system.

Sentinel Hotspots (Sentinel Bushfire Monitoring) was developed in 2002 by CSIRO, Geoscience Australia, and the Australian Defense Imagery and Geospatial Organization. It is an Internet-based mapping tool that provides real-time information on natural disasters across Australia.

The Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO) is the Australian government’s scientific research branch. It has it origins in 1926 as the Advisory Council of Science and Industry.

According to senior CSIRO Marine and Atmospheric Research scientist Dr. Alex Held, “This will be a critical information delivery system on wildfires, flooding, drought, and landslides in our region, where those events can be seen by Earth observing satellites in real time." [CSIRO: “Monitoring Asia-Pacific disasters from space”]

Held continued to say, “Australia has had a pivotal, strategic role in developing the system which has the potential to benefit billions of people in our region by assisting authorities in a recovery response. The concept of Sentinel Asia is to provide online information from Earth observation satellites in 'near real-time' through a network of webGIS services such as the Australian Sentinel Hotspots system."

CSIRO reports that the Sentinel Asia disaster-reporting system has been used on ten separate occasions in the last twelve months by seven countries (including Australia) in response to flooding and earthquake incidents.

Further advancements are planned for the system as nodes are added for the availability to more countries, addition of new high-bandwidth communications satellites to provide faster data gathering capabilities, and access to other orbiting satellites not already in the system.

Currently, the Sentinel Asia system uses satellites operating from the United States, countries from Europe, Japan, and India. For instance, the Japanese node of Sentinel Asia is found at: http://dmss.tksc.jaxa.jp/sentinel/. Future satellites are expected to be added from countries in the Asia-Pacific region.

Begun in August 2006, Asia Sentinel is a web-based regional publication that concentrates on business/economics, news, analysis and opinion on national and regional issues, arts and culture, and other such subjects for the Asia-Pacific region.

The headquarters of Sentinel Asia is Hong Kong. It was founded when news coverage in the Asia-Pacific region began to fade when western-owned publications left the area or began reduced coverage of the area. For instance, "Asiaweek" was discontinued by Time Magazine in 2002 and the "Far Eastern Economic Review" was reduced from weekly to monthly by Dow Jones Co. in 2004.

Its founding members are John Berthelsen (editor, former editor of The Standard newspaper in Hong Kong), Philip Bowring (consultant editor, formerly Asia commentator for The International Herald Tribune), A. Lin Neumann (executive editor, formerly executive editor of The Standard), and Kevin Phillips (international business director, formerly head of equities in Hong Kong and Tokyo for Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein).