In a conversation with Geospatial World, Dr. Giulia Tessari, Remote Sensing Specialist, Sarmap SA, a Swiss company that is dedicated to implementing tools for processing synthetic aperture radar (SAR) data.
Dr. Tessari believes, “India is in a fragile state considering it experiences most of the natural hazards from flooding, earthquakes to landslides. I believe, this is an area where this technology can support and help the decision-makers to improve and to find solutions to make the future sustainable.”
What is the mission and vision of your company?
The mission is to develop and provide innovative, sophisticated yet simple customized Earth Observation solutions, dedicated to the generation of digital information of Earth system, ensuring technical advantages and economic benefits.
We generate tools to process SAR data that can help the life of users. Some of the users are expert in SAR processing, while some are just beginners. That is why we create user-friendly application that allows to extract interesting information, especially related to natural hazards. We also train our customers thus actively growing the SAR community.
What geospatial technologies you use to procure data?
The data is acquired by satellite missions which we support. We create the tool that can help the user to analyze satellite data and extract information.
How can SAR data be useful for disaster management?
The data we release is complementary to optical data. For example in case of floods or volcano eruption, the cloud cover and smoke make visibility poor, but SAR sensors can penetrate the cloud. SAR sensors can also work during night without depending on the sun’s illumination, which helps in to track illegal activities that happen during night and goes untraceable in case of optical sensors. SAR provides a complementary information that needs to be integrated into optical data.
SAR data provides key information which makes it possible to measure the formation with millimetric sensitivity. Best example of this is landslide. These data are of high use in floods as they can penetrate clouds and substitute optical data in many cases when the natural condition does not allow the use of optical data. Besides, it helps in target detection for tectonic movement.
How can geospatial data come in play in giving early warnings?
During landslide this data helps in reconstructing the behavior of the formation and we have archival data starting from the 90’s just locally, and for all over the world from 2014. That’s how it was possible to analyze the back history, the pre-event and to have a sort of story of the evolution of the slope. This helps to at least understand where to set a more detailed sensor and create a base map to have all the information happening in Himalayans area or in the Alps, which we are also doing in Switzerland.
Everyone is facing the wrath of climate change. How can earth observation data help in taking the right decision?
The big power like remote sensing data in general can now cover the entire planet. You can work at large scale, integrate different sensor, different information, which makes them one of the most important source of data information to characterize how this climate change is affecting our earth. Besides, it is important to take into consideration how political dynamics are, and they are made aware of the data but if they don’t know how the earth is evolving, it’s hard for them to take any decision.
What are the projects you’re working on presently?
At present, Sarmap is monitoring Switzerland. We are creating the deformation map of Switzerland and updating it every year. Besides, we are involved in several agricultural projects, and monitoring of drought in India. We are also involved in ones related to hydrology in Africa. We deal a lot with defense clients on target detection.
All the deformation maps that we are creating will be used by experts working on glaciers, on landslides, urban planning so that there should be just one source of information. And any institute can take advantage of this information. The results are going to be shared in the geoportal, from where end users can download the information.
What is the importance of a national mapping agency?
Having an institute at national level, which is coordinating activities, is helping to have a common standard on the way data are provided. Quite often when you fragment too much information, everyone is using different standards, and then it becomes difficult to compare information and to create a general way to spread across different users. The community should be able to use the information in a right way and national mapping agencies need to make sure of that.
What is the adverse impact of climate change on Switzerland’s glaciers?
The global warming is causing the melting of most of the glaciers around the world and in case of Switzerland’s glaciers, we are accelerating the process of mapping them, but to change the trend, obviously scientists are not enough.
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