Crisis Information Centre fights against flood in South Sudan

The Crisis Information Centre that works at the Earth Observation Group of the Space Research Centre has attempted to develop an early warning system that will permit to inform of the coming flood, which will allow preventive evacuation of people from areas at risk.

An important element of the system are the analysis based on satellite images and other geospatial data. The results of the initial stage of the works are historical maps with flooded areas based on data from the MODIS sensor at Terra satellite and a hydrological model developed from digital terrain model created by the SRTM mission. Currently on a regular basis are created flooding area maps that allow to follow the development of crisis situation. Until now, based on data from OLI (Landsat 8) and MODIS (Terra), there were created several maps which quality is verified on the fly by its end users from the helping organizations and local authorities in South Sudan.

It is schedulded to activate a network of water gauges whose measures will help to evaluate the hydrological model.

The activities in South Sudan are conducted in cooperation with the Polish Center for International Aid in the scope of the Polish development cooperation programme of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Poland.