Research and Development

The Center for Satellite Based Crisis Information (ZKI) is engaged in the research and development of operational methods and specific products to ensure continuous improvement of satellite based crisis information requested by users in the field of disaster management. Therefore research efforts of the DLR Remote Sensing Technology Institute (IMF) and the German Remote Sensing Data Center (DFD) within the Applied Remote Sensing Cluster are integrated into the operational work of ZKI.

The research and development efforts of ZKI consist of two main fields:

Risk analysis as central component in disaster management

The central aim of risk modelling is to provide information and products relevant for disaster management. The aim of our research is to develop and to provide concepts and methodologies which describe and quantify hazard and vulnerability appropriately. The results of risk assessment constitute important information for effective disaster management. In crisis situations vulnerability information (e.g. number of people affected, number of exposed critical infrastructure, potential infrastructure damage, coping and recovery potentials) can support emergency relief and recovery efforts.

Fast and reliable derivation of crisis information

In a crisis situation specific information and products have to be derived and provided to support emergency relief in a fast and reliable manner. The major challenge is to offer high quality products in a short time. One central research issue is how to ensure fast access to spatial data stored and maintained in a geospatial data repository. This requires the development and implementation of a tailored, open standard based geodata management system which is a central issue in the development work of ZKI.

Depending on the type of hazard, specific data and algorithms are being used. For example flood-related derivation of crisis information requires the use of specific satellite sensor types (e.g. TerraSAR-X) and algorithms (e.g. flood mask extraction). This generally meets the user expectation for hazard specific crisis information.
In the context of various projects, ZKI develops new methodologies for the derivation of crisis relevant information, for example for floods, earthquakes and fire hazards, taking into account the points mentioned above. In the field of forest fire detection, the German Remote Sensing Data Center (DFD) is the only European institution that is able to receive the data of the MODIS sensors of both platforms (Terra-1 and Aqua-1). In collaboration with the Mexican Commission on Biodiversity Research (Conabio) a method was developed to use this data to automatically detect forest fires based on the USGS mod14 algorithm. This service, providing daily actualised vector and raster data and OGC web services for download, can be accessed here.

Parts of the research and development work are carried out in the framework of internships, Master and PhD theses. ZKI provides interesting opportunities and if you are interested, please contact zki@dlr.de for further information.