Nishan Kumar Biswas (617/UMBC) and Robert Emberson (617/UMBC) participated in the NASA SERVIR AST (Applied Sciences Team) Science Exchange, held in Huntsville, AL, from May 10-12, 2022. The event was geared toward exploring innovations in the use of Earth observation information to address global development challenges. According to Dr. Biswas, "We are working on improving water resources and hydroclimatic disasters monitoring and prediction using satellite earth observation data provided by NASA (and other space agencies)." NASA's SERVIR global program has a mandate to address critical challenges in food security, water resources, weather and climate, land use, and disasters in developing countries using satellite data, according to its site.
During the exchange, Dr. Biswas gave a presentation titled “A Landslide Hazard and Risk Assessment System for SERVIR-Mekong”, in which he discussed the application of satellite observations and tools for landslide prediction and exposure analysis in the Lower Mekong Region in Asia. Both Drs. Biswas and Emberson participated in the discussion on critical lessons learned and feedback. They shared the findings and the challenges to increase awareness of the tools and model capabilities developed by the Landslides Team at NASA GSFC and to build the capacity of the stakeholders and regional partners to use these tools within open-source cloud-computing frameworks.
Learn more about the NASA GSFC Landslides Team's efforts and the Global Landslide Hazard Assessment for Situational Awareness (LHASA) Model this team developed.