Philippines is prone to many natural disasters because of its location. Every year it faces more than 20 typhoons, out of which five are comparatively destructive in nature not only for infrastructure but also to human life. The Department of Science and Technology, from the Advanced Science and Technology Institute (DOST-ASTI), Philippines, focuses mainly on predicting areas of natural disasters like typhoon damage and others. DOST-ASTI intends to deliver technology solutions that support a productive and resilient Philippine society. DOST-ASTI used to rely on extracting ground-based data for years, which had a long latency causing delays in providing real-time information to those sitting at the top-level decision-making posts.
To get a better way to improve disaster management and monitoring, and get timely information on natural disaster policies, DOST-ASTI has joined hands with Planet partner, Geospectrum, which will provide them with access to Planet Satellite data.
“We recognized that if we could add in the information provided by satellite imagery into our workflows, this would provide us a more accurate perspective on what really happened at the ground level,” said Harold Bryan S. Paler, Senior Science Research Specialist at DOST-ASTI. “When we ventured into space activities we had subscriptions to commercial satellites, but these presented new challenges, the main one being the long temporal revisit. For example, if we wanted to capture images in the area we had, we had to wait several days before we could get the capture. This was not sufficient for effective disaster response and the environmental monitoring we required,” he added.
Once a typhoon hits, Planet’s satellite imagery allows DOST-ASTI to assess the damage that has occurred and uses the monitoring data to benefit the country’s citizens by providing real-time information. Further, the data help its government formulate policies based on research studies using satellite data.
According to Paler, “Because of Planet’s high-temporal resolution, we are able to get the images as soon as possible and then proactively send them to different government units and disaster management councils who require this information.”
